General Education Activity | STEM Career Connection: Sports Statistician
Standards: 2007 MN Math 3.1.1.5, 3.4.1.1, 4.4.1.1, 5.1.2.5, 5.4.1.1, 5.4.1.2
Statistics can tell us so much about a player’s career. This activity invites your students to dig deeper into career stats.
Materials:
Pencil
Paper
Calculator (if needed)
Predict:
What kind of math do you think we can use to analyze athletes?
Plan:
What information do you think will be the most important to look at? What information are you expecting to find?
Play:
Gather data:
Provide students with a link or a printed version of the compiled statistics, provided in the Resources section.
Students can choose a column to analyze, or the educator can choose one to compare as a class.
Analysis Options:
Give time for students to look over the data and find things that stand out to them.
Record student observations.
Have students look for patterns in a column of data.
What are the most common post-football jobs?
What is the average number of years in the league?
What are the highest paid positions? How about the lowest?
Have students look for patterns in the positions that the players played and the salary that they received. Why do you think different players/positions received higher/lower pay?
What patterns do you notice about the first year played in the NFL and the player’s salary?
Ponder:
What was challenging about playing with the numbers?
How were you able to organize numbers in a way that helped give you a better understanding of the player or the activity?
What percentage of players had a college degree?
Extension:
Have students create a visual representation of the data they created by making a poster chart, a google slide, or a graphic of the educator’s choosing.
Have students do statistical analysis of an individual player. What are the player’s averages for the assorted stats?