Okay, so today I’m gonna walk you through my experience tackling a “Stanford Depth Chart Football” project. Honestly, when I first heard about it, I was kinda intimidated, but hey, gotta learn somehow, right?
First off, I had to gather the data. This was probably the most tedious part. I scoured the web, looked at official Stanford Athletics pages, news reports, anything I could get my hands on. The goal was to build an accurate depth chart, meaning who’s likely to start and their backups for each position. Think quarterback, running back, wide receivers, offensive line – the whole shebang.
Then came the fun part: cleaning and organizing the data. You know how it is – information all over the place, different formats, inconsistencies. I ended up using a spreadsheet, just plain old Excel. I made columns for position, player name, year, and then a ranking for the depth chart (starter, backup, etc.). It took a while, but slowly, a picture started to emerge.
Next, I started to visualize the depth chart. I experimented with different layouts, trying to make it easy to understand at a glance. I tried a simple table format first, then moved to something a bit more graphical, with the starter’s name in a bigger font and maybe some color-coding to highlight the different positions. This involved a lot of trial and error, tweaking things until it looked right.
Analyzing the data was key. Just having a depth chart wasn’t enough. I wanted to see if I could spot any trends or insights. Were there any positions where Stanford was particularly deep or thin? Were there any young players poised to break out? This part required me to use the search engine, because I can’t really know who is “good” from just looking at the data.
Finally, I tried to keep it updated. A football depth chart is a living document. Injuries happen, players improve, coaching decisions change. To make this project truly useful, I needed to be able to update the depth chart regularly based on news and performance. I set up some Google Alerts to track relevant news and tried to stay on top of things during the season.
It wasn’t perfect, of course. There were definitely gaps in the information and some subjective calls I had to make. But overall, I learned a ton about data collection, organization, and visualization. And hey, now I feel like I actually know something about Stanford football! It was a pretty cool little deep dive.
