NFL Injuries - 2015 Regular Season

A few weeks ago, as I was trying to find an interesting dataset to analyze, I promised myself I wouldn't be drawn into creating another sports-related viz. As you might have guessed from the title, or from a peek at the viz below, I wasn't very successful. This will be the last post on sports-related content for a while (if I can help it).

I happened to be scrolling through the NFL's website, and came across a well structured set of official injury reports from last season. Immediately, I knew this was an opportunity to answer a few questions that had been on my mind for a while now:

1. What NFL position is the most dangerous to play? QB and WR concussions gain a lot of media attention and protection from the referees, but I suspected that defensive players were likely subject to many unsung perils (a hunch that proved to be true, as you can see that linebacker was the most injured position last year).
2. In Tableau, how do you plot data points onto a custom image/background/map? I had read the nice and straightforward knowledge base article on it, but was itching to give it a go in practice.
3. How do you use basic (free) web scraping tools? I had seen references to both import.io and datascraping.co and decided to give the latter one a shot. All in all, it turned out to be a fairly easy tool to use, although it still left me with a fair amount of manual cleanup to do. I plan on giving import.io a shot the next time I have data to pull from a website.

That should be enough background for now-- enjoy the viz below! I was startled/disturbed by numerous takeaways, including:

1. The general degradation of players' bodies over the season. Even with the dip in injuries due to heavy bye weeks, the trend is unmistakeable. As the season continues, more players are showing up on the injury report.
2. QBs do not get injured all that often (relative to other positions, anyway, as they are ranked 11th in terms of injury volume).
3. Lower body injuries are the most common ailments for almost every single position.
4. Defensive players are injured far more often than offensive players (and yet, the most prominent anti-head-hunting and anti-targeting rules are in place to protect offensive players).
5. I almost forgot-- don't let your kid play linebacker!