I led several visual-first projects for FiveThirtyEight’s coverage of Super Bowl LVII.

(Note: All of these projects involved large groups: the halftime story involved the work of visual journalist Paroma Soni and data editor Holly Fuong; the size of the NFL was the work of visual journalist Ryan Best; and the exciting Super Bowls story was done by visual journalist Elena Mejía, computational journalist Jay Boice, and editor Maya Sweedler. My role was to serve as a visual editor and project manager for these.)

For the Halftime show story, we created a metric we called MARIAH (Metric for Appraising Records, Indexed to Analyze Halftimes) because as we tried to figure out the halftime show with the most star power based on the Billboard 100, Mariah Carey came out on top because every year she charts again at Christmas. Using this metric, we were able to rate both solo performers and ensembles and compare them. The story was exactly the kind of rigorous but light tone we needed for a project like this and this piece performed well online.

We also took a look at when songs were featured in the Super Bowl versus when they were actually charting. In some cases, songs were featured at the height of their popularity. In others, the song had faded off the charts years before and returned to the Hot 100 in the wake of its Super Bowl debut.

For the story, “How Massive the NFL Really Is, in 4 Charts,” we struggled for a bit to conceptualize what the story was truly about. We had this terrific visual, created by visual journalist Ryan Best:

We eventually decided to simply find ways to show how the NFL is essentially in its own category in so many ways: in viewership, in individual attendance per game (or simply, size of stadium), and overall team value.

The last visual Super Bowl story involved visualizing how win probability changed during the course of famous games.