I found the following visualization on the web. For some reason, it caught my eye.

Infographic by Jeff Beckham

The caption says:

Colt McCoy has thrown for 9,732 yards in his career at Texas. That’s 5.5 miles of spirals. If he throws for another 3,696 yards this season, he’ll have covered the distance from his hometown of Buffalo Gap to his high school in Tuscola.

I don’t follow College Football, so I had no idea who Colt McCoy was. According to Wikipedia:

Colt McCoy is the starting quarterback for the University of Texas. McCoy won the 2008 Walter Camp Award and was the 2008 Heisman Trophy runner-up. McCoy is considered a first round NFL draft prospect.

He has finished 3 years at the University of Texas, so he is averaging 3,244 yards per year. Hitting the target of an additional 3,696 yards seems possible.

When I saw the two arcs leaving the same point but traveling different paths, I thought I was going to write about how when a line curves, there can be visual difficulties determining proportions between the two arcs. In this image, for the same amount of vertical drop, the outermost arc will travel a longer distance.

This made me think that the best way to show the data is via a map, as we are talking about geographic distances.

I went to Google driving directions and entered Buffalo Gap, Texas and Tuscola, Texas, and I found out that via roads, the distance between the two places is 7.6 miles (13,428 yards). Aha, this is the distance that the original infographic shows as the distance between Buffalo Gap and Tuscola.

I think that seeing this path on a map breaks the football passing metaphor. Passes do not generally take right hand turns.

Using Google Earth, I found out that the city centers of Buffalo Gap and Tuscola are only 5.16 miles apart via a straight line, as the football flies, so to speak. So Colt McCoy has likely already thrown the distance from his hometown to Tuscola.

I think the lesson here is that when the appropriate display mechanism is chosen, information that you might otherwise miss becomes clear.

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