way, helping to reflect on the past Athletic Season, and look forward to the future. If you are not sure what the Director's Cup is, well, you can read more here (https://thedirectorscup.com/about/). Essentially, it is the annual "Stanford Award of Excellence in Every Sport Award" (I kid, I kid ... mostly ... they just tend to win it every year!)

The Director's Cup website self-proclaims itself as "the crowning achievement in college athletics." I'm not exactly sure about that, however, I do agree that it IS a great way to see how all college athletic programs stack up against each other across the nation. I thought there could be a better way to visualize the data than just sifting through old PDFs, so I created a Tableau Dashboard to help with visualization.

Check out my link on Tableau Public, and see what you think:



NOTE: This is best viewed and consumed on a computer, but mobile will work in a pinch (although a bit finicky).


I started this project just as something fun on the side, but now hope to grow it into a better way to understand and consume the college sports landscape. The hardest part about this project was collecting all of the data from the PDF files on Learfield's website (https://thedirectorscup.com/). I have compiled 7 seasons of results so far, and it is my hope to continue to add historical data to this dashboard, as well as future data, as it becomes available. It looks like there are PDF's available with data back to 1993 (https://nacda.com/sports/2018/7/17/directorscup-nacda-directorscup-previous-scoring-html.aspx).

It's kind of fun to compare BYU to athletic departments all across the country. Go ahead and check out how we rank against the other teams in Utah, the Big 12, and the Pac 12 (Spoiler alert: BYU belongs with the best of them out there). If you want to look at past "candidates" for the Big 12 as well, you'll quickly see our athletic programs are far and away better in every way.

Here's to another great year of Cougar Athletics! If you're wondering, the final Fall Rankings for the 2018-2019 school year will come out in a week or so. BYU is currently ranked 5th in the nation! Way to go Women's Cross Country, Men's Cross Country, Women's Soccer, Women's Volleyball, and yes, Football (we will be getting some final points from Football for their Bowl victory).

(https://nacda.com/documents/2018/12/18/Dec20DIOverall.pdf)

Go Cougs!