Sports, of course, exist solely as a means of aggregating and crunching data, and the easier said data is to digest, the better. Christopher Healey, associate professor at North Carolina State University, has constructed a set of visualizations that reflect each and every NFL game from last season. To show one example, here’s a visualization of the final ten minutes or so of the Bears’ season (sorry):

A brief “how to read this” tutorial is provided here. The green field represents the football field itself. The red represents the Bears’ offensive progress, the blue represents the Texans’, and the patterns represent whether the movement of the ball was a result of a pass, run  or penalty.

This visualization format isn’t completely new — if you’ve ever had to follow a game via ESPN’s GameCast, you’ll recognize it. These visualizations are far more concise, and more importantly, they’re provided for every single game last season. I mean, I just “watched” every game of the season by scrolling down this page for about three minutes. This is probably the closest I’ll ever get to feeling like Tank from The Matrix.

(Via.)