fog Page 3 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights

Have Spelling Bee "Winning Words" Always Been So Obscure?
Arvind Mahankali won the 2013 National Spelling Bee on "knaidel," a type of dumpling. The winning word the year prior was "guetapens," before that "cymotrichous," and before that "stromuhr." Have bee-winning words always been this insane, or is this a recent development? ...

Heights And Weights Of Athletes, By Position, In The "Big Four" Sports
Last fall, Craig Booth put together an excellent series of charts on the heights and weights of current NFL players, by position. Now Sportchart—who created that NHL map from a few weeks ago—has taken the analysis a step further, comparing the height and weight distributions of major positions acros...

The Time Travel Of <em>Bill And Ted's Excellent Adventure</em>, Visualized
Over on FlipFlopFlyin', Craig Robinson has put together a graphic summarizing all the time travel in Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure. The film leaves some of the exact dates open to interpretation—did they hang out with Genghis Khan in 1209 or 1269?—but these details are well handled here, and we...

Which Famous Singers Have The Widest Vocal Ranges?
Concerthotels.com has put together a neat interactive showcasing the (in-studio) vocal ranges of over 7o famous figures. The top of the list is above. Axl Rose is your surprising victor, but the high notes are the crowd-pleasers, and here, Mariah Carey—with her insane G7—stands alone....

165 Sweet Basketball Jerseys On One Gorgeous Poster
With the basketball season winding down, Pop Chart Lab has put together a great new poster showcasing 165 notable jersey designs, from the 1921 New York Celtics through the "Latin Night" alternates of the 2014 Suns. Most of the offerings come from the NBA, but there's a smattering of Globetrotter, A...

The Prettiest MLB Box Scores You Can Find Online Are Now Updated Live
You might remember Statlas's baseball graphics from the end of last season, which aimed to provide a more contextual, visually-appealing update to traditional MLB box scores....

Which NBA Teams Does Your Town Root For?
Like they did for baseball fandoms, The Upshot has put together a map of which zip codes root for which NBA teams, based on Facebook data. It's pretty cool....

Geoff Ogilvy Sounds Like A Real Asshole
Geoff Ogilvy hasn't won on the PGA tour in four years, and after hearing how the Australian golfer treated a local radio station during the Players Championship this week at TPC Sawgrass we can't say we're looking forward to him hoisting a trophy anytime soon....

Which Words Are Used To Describe White And Black NFL Prospects?
Do NFL scouts talk about white players and black players differently? Are certain words reserved for white players? Are others used primarily to describe black players?...

What Are The Most "Overrated" and "Underrated" Movies?
What movies do audiences love, but critics hate? Over on his blog, Ben Moore tackles this question with data scraped from the Rotten Tomatoes API. The chart above shows the critic and audience scores for over 1,200 films; movies that scored high with viewers (and were panned by critics) are in red i...

Liverpool Would Have The Biggest Turnaround For A Champion In 29 Years
The race for the Premier League title got a lot closer this Sunday, as Liverpool fell to Chelsea and Manchester City topped Crystal Palace. With one fewer game played, City holds the goal differential tiebreak over Liverpool, and is currently a 4/5 favorite to win it all....

Who Were The Tallest Athletes In History?
As part of the new collection Sportographica, the chart above shows the tallest players in history by sport/league/discipline. While there isn't a regular-sized human in there to give you context, consider this: If you stacked all these professional athletes on top of each others, the pile would str...

Charts: Your Spending Habits Get Lamer As You Age
In a neat series of charts, NPR Planet Money looks at how spending changes over the course of an average American's lifetime. All the data are indexed against the average spending of 25-year-olds, which is when "Bars And Clubs" spending peaks, and not much else....

Graphic: The History Of NHL Home Jerseys
Reddit user Tomer139 has created this fantastic chart showing the evolution of the home sweaters of every NHL team. It's massive, so click below or here to see it at full size....

How Have The Weights Of NFL Positions Changed Over Time?
Craig Booth—who previously made those NFL height/weight charts—just released a great series of graphics showing how the median weights of various positions have changed since 1950, based on data from Pro Football Reference. Booth isn't the first to visualize this sort of trend, but the inclusion of ...

Was 2013 Really The Golden Age Of The Black Quarterback?
Charts excerpted from The Big Book Of Black Quarterbacks, published Feb. 6th....

So, Which Countries Had The Worst Olympics?
After the usual agonizing about who's winning the Olympics—Do you use medal count or gold count? What about something weighted? WHAT ABOUT GDP?—Russia made things relatively easy at the end of the day, seemingly establishing itself as the consensus winner....

Which Winter Olympic Sport Has The Biggest Athletes?
Originally published on Mode Analytics....

Sochi Organizers Attempt To Clear Fog With Giant Fans
Heavy fog in the mountains above Sochi caused postponements of men's biathlon and snowboard cross races today. Visibilities were near zero at times, making the shooting portion of biathlon impossible, and snowboarding downright dangerous. But let no one say organizers didn't try everything in their ...

Chart: Does Your Choice Of Candy Reveal Your Politics?
We already covered this for booze, but the research firm NMRPP has released a chart showing the political leanings (x-axis) and voter turnout (y-axis) of various major candy brands. Bubble size is proportional to the population of survey respondents who ate each type of candy....