Our latest free-lance offering: Super Bowl graphics package
We figured it might be time to fill you in on our lastest free-lance offering: A package of Super Bowl graphics.
The Super Bowl isn’t a local story for most papers, but readers all over the U.S. have a tremendous amount of interest in the game. The Associated Press and McClatchy-Tribune move Super Bowl graphics, but we’ve often found we didn’t have just what we wanted to run with our stories. Therefore, I’d often whip up something myself.
So now that I’m on my own and trying to think a step or two ahead of the fine designers and editors of newspaperland — in hopes of meeting their needs — we put together a package of eight separate graphics of various sizes to run with the kinds of stories we knew would be appearing in stories over the latter part of the week.
The package included a variety of pieces — in both black-and-white and color — from the obligatory one-column statistical comparison bar-chart that could run with any preview story…
…to a four-column playoff recap bracket, illustrated with our 3D-like “button” logos (click for a larger view)…
…to a chart listing the closest Super Bowl victories and the most embarrassing blowouts:
That was a stacked, two-column version. We also offered it in a four-column version.
We also offered a straightforward one-column list of every Super Bowl score and MVP and a very small chart showing how many MVPs were named from various positions:
A big part of our pitch was this starting lineup chart (again, click for a larger view):
We told papers that even if they didn’t have room for this large, four-column chart, they could slap their logo across the bottom and distribute it as a PDF on their web sites. (Go here and scroll down the left side. You’ll find links.)
Had we to do this all over again, we’d have also offered a six-column version of this chart containing breakout stats for backs and receivers, sacks and tackles for defenders and two-deeps for offensive linemen. Probably no one would have run it, but — wow, it would have been a really cool chart just the same.
The jewel of the set was this six-column piece, though. We’ve drawn a similar chart several times over the years:
Click for a larger view. Or, just scroll down where we’ll break it into two stacked pieces, just to view here:
The blue bars are wins by NFC teams; the red bars are wins by AFC teams. The bar itself is the margin of victory. We pulled out info on nine of the closest games.
What does the chart show us? For starters, it suggests the NFC teams dominant during the late 1980s and 1990s won by larger margins than did the AFC teams dominant in the 1979s and early 1980s, or even the recent AFC-dominant era.
It also suggests that with exceptions of 2001 and 2003, the era of the three- or four-touchdown blowout has been over for a while. Four of the last seven games have been decided by a field goal.
We can say that in a story. But seeing it laid out like this is compelling reading. Or so we contend.
We sent out e-mail solicitations on Monday night, with a link to a PDF file containing early versions of the graphics.
We sent out the final versions Wednesday to the two papers that bought the package. Both are New York Times-owned papers based in the Carolinas: the Herald-Journal in Spartanburg, S.C., and the Star-News of Wilmington, N.C.