Uncrustables in the NFL

The question

NFL teams go through thousands of Uncrustables a week, and a Travis Kelce podcast aside had people half-seriously crediting the sandwiches for a Super Bowl. Is there anything there, or is it nostalgia with a good PR team?

What the data said

I pulled the survey figures and set them against passing yards and touchdowns. The teams eating the most, around 13 sandwiches per player per week, scored no more than the teams eating four to six. The survey numbers didn’t support the Super Bowl XLI theory.

A decade of Google search interest showed steady growth, but Uncrustables still trail comparable frozen breakfast products. Popularity in locker rooms hadn’t translated into freezer dominance at home.

Each sandwich also carries added sugar above USDA guidance, more than 10% of its calories. Professional athletes burn through that; the rest of us don’t.

The point

I had fun with this one. The story was an exercise in taking a silly claim seriously enough to test it, then telling the reader what the data can and can’t say. Seven charts, built in Datawrapper and Flourish, carried the argument; the prose stayed out of their way.