Like many people who grew up in Pittsburgh, I am watching the Steelers’ hopes for another championship slipping away. My last two weeks have been filled with dreams of unlikely scenarios (Is it possible for three NFL games to end in a tie?) or unanswerable questions (Do the Bengals like the Steelers more or less than the Jets?).
There is nothing left to Steelers fans like me, except to speculate. I awoke Saturday morning to The New York Times’ Judy Battista who laid out the AFC playoff scenarios in one of the web’s best storytelling devices, a series of lists. As she usual does, Judy presented each of the three to five possible scenarios laying out each one like an arithmetic problem.
This would have been a great storytelling solution to a fairly complicated problem, except that Yahoo had already told the same story better. Yahoo Sports’ NFL Playoff Scenario Generator let’s users pick who wins each game with a simple, visual toggle. Or they allow users to predict the outcome of all the games based on 10 different metrics. The generator visually depicts the changing playoff picture as the user makes their selections (if only Yahoo used Javascript and CSS instead of Flash this would be a great smartphone tool).
Confessions of a Hero-Worshiper
Miracle at Midway
