Chart assignment

Charts to read and discuss

Read each chart, then answer its questions. Every chart shows its source and date; open it for a table of the numbers and the data to download.

  1. How has your NFL team done each season since 1999?
  2. Which big U.S. cities have the highest murder rates?

Chart 1 of 2 · NFL

How has your NFL team done each season since 1999?

The interactive chart needs JavaScript. The numbers are on the chart's page.

Choose any NFL team to see its points scored, points allowed and wins each regular season since 1999, next to the NFL average. It opens with the Kansas City Chiefs, who scored 21.3 points a game in the 2025 regular season; their high since 1999 was 35.3, in 2018. Teams that moved include their old cities' seasons (the Raiders' in Oakland, the Chargers' in San Diego, the Rams' in St. Louis), and the Houston Texans start in 2002, their first season. Seasons grew from 16 games to 17 in 2021, so points are per game.

Questions to discuss

  1. In one sentence of your own, what does this chart show?
  2. Find the biggest change or difference in the chart. What might explain it?
  3. Who collected these numbers, and how recent are they? What else would you want to know before drawing a conclusion?

Source: nflverse, NFL schedules and scores (nflverse-data) (CC BY 4.0 (nflverse)) · Data as of Jan 4, 2026

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Chart 2 of 2 · Crime

Which big U.S. cities have the highest murder rates?

The interactive chart needs JavaScript. The numbers are on the chart's page.

In 2025 St. Louis, MO had the highest murder rate of the 89 biggest U.S. cities whose police reported a full year to the FBI, about 51.3 per 100,000 people, followed by Memphis, TN (31.0) and Cleveland, OH (28.0). Irvine, CA (0.0) and Plano, TX (0.7) had the lowest; the U.S. rate was about 4.4. Departments that didn't report a full year are left out (for 2025, New Orleans, Orlando and St. Petersburg, Florida). Each rate is per person the department serves, and a few, such as Las Vegas, Honolulu, Jacksonville and Louisville, serve their whole county. A city's rate also depends on where its borders fall, so compare cities with care.

How to read this chart

Each bar is the number of murders in a city in one year for every 100,000 people its police department serves. The dashed line is the U.S. rate. Murders are rare, so in a smaller city a handful more or fewer in one year can move its rate and its rank a lot.

Questions to discuss

  1. How many cities on the chart have a murder rate above the U.S. rate, and how many are below it?
  2. Why does a chart like this use murders per 100,000 people instead of the total number of murders in each city?
  3. A city's rank can jump from one year to the next. Why might small numbers make rates bounce around?

Source: FBI Crime Data Explorer, Uniform Crime Reporting Program (Public domain (U.S. government work); source FBI Uniform Crime Reporting Program) · Data as of Dec 31, 2025

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