Alright, let me tell you about this Villanova National Championship project I tackled. It was a wild ride, but totally worth it in the end.
First off, I had this itch to visualize Villanova’s path to the national championship. I mean, that ’16 team was legendary, and I wanted to break down exactly how they did it. I started by gathering all the game data I could find. Box scores, game logs, the works. Scraped a bunch of websites, and honestly, it was a bit of a pain, but gotta do what you gotta do, right?
Next up, I cleaned the data. Oh man, the cleaning. Dates were inconsistent, team names were all over the place, and some stats were just missing. I used Python with Pandas – my go-to for data wrangling. Spent hours tweaking things, making sure everything was in a usable format. It was tedious, but cleaning is KING. No clean data, no good project.
Once the data was relatively clean, I started thinking about the visualization. I wanted something interactive, something that let you explore each game, see the key players, and understand the overall tournament run. Initially, I thought about using *, but then I decided to keep it simple and went with Tableau. I know, some might say it’s cheating, but it gets the job done, and I could get something polished up way faster.
In Tableau, I built a bunch of different charts and dashboards. Had a bracket view showing their entire path. Then I made individual game breakdowns with scores, key stats, and even some win probability charts I hacked together. I also added filters so you could easily compare games, look at specific players, and that kind of stuff.
The real challenge came when I tried to make it look good. I’m no designer, so this part was mostly trial and error. Messed around with colors, fonts, and layouts until I had something I wasn’t totally ashamed of. Took a lot of inspiration from sports infographics I found online. Gotta learn from the pros, you know?
After that, I shared it with some friends, got some feedback (mostly about how ugly it was, haha), and made a few tweaks. Finally, I put it up online. It’s nothing crazy, but it’s a cool little project I’m proud of. Plus, I learned a ton about data visualization and cleaning messy datasets.
If I were to do it again, I’d probably spend more time on the design. Maybe even learn * properly so I can create completely custom visuals. But for now, it’s a solid project and a fun way to relive that Villanova championship run.
