Note: Live-moderation for this graph will take place on Wednesday, Dec. 11. The next graph will be posted by Friday, Dec. 13, with live-moderation on Jan. 8, 2025.

A few years ago The Athletic wrote about orange slices, the NFL’s secret halftime snack (fun fact: teams are required to provide “three dozen sliced oranges for halftime” for the visiting team). But in the course of reporting that story, many players said they passed on halftime citrus in favor of something else: Uncrustables, the sealed peanut butter and jelly sandwiches found in the frozen aisle of your local supermarket — and apparently permeating the N.F.L.

At the end of the 2023 season, The Athletic endeavored to find out just how many Uncrustables the league actually eats. The graph above came from that reporting.

The graph below, produced by our “What’s Going On in This Graph?” team, displays the relationship between 2023 N.F.L. standings by football team and the number of Uncrustables eaten per week for each of the 24 teams that provided data to The Athletic.

Image

Credit…Erica Chauvet

1. After looking closely at the graphs above, answer these four questions:

What do you notice?

What do you wonder?

How does this relate to you and your community?

Create a catchy headline that captures the graphs’ main ideas.

The questions are intended to build on one another, so try to answer them in order.

2. Next, join the conversation online by clicking on the comment button and posting in the box. (Teachers of students younger than 13 are welcome to post their students’ responses.)

3. Below the response box, there is an option to click on “Email me when my comment is published.” This sends the link to your response which you can share with your teacher.

4. After you have posted, read what others have said, then respond to someone else by posting a comment. Use the “Reply” button to address that student directly.

On Wednesday, Dec. 11, teachers from our collaborator, the American Statistical Association, will facilitate this discussion from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. Eastern time.

5. By Friday morning, Dec. 13, we will reveal more information about the graph, including a free link to the article that includes this graph, at the bottom of this post. We encourage you to post additional comments based on the article, possibly using statistical terms defined in the Stat Nuggets.

Reveal

Image

Credit…The Athletic

As part of the article “Wait, N.F.L. Players Eat How Many Uncrustables?” (Oct. 24, 2024), The Athletic published the featured infographic (see Stat Nugget below) that shows the popularity of Uncrustables for N.F.L. (National Football League) teams, the sealed peanut butter and jelly sandwiches (available in five flavors including hazelnut spread) found in the freezer aisle of your local supermarket. According to The J.M. Smucker Company, which makes and sells Uncrustables, sales were expected to surpass $800 million in 2023, with the company producing roughly 3 million sandwiches daily.

At the end of the 2023 football season, The Athletic convinced 24 of the 34 N.F.L. teams to share their data on how many Uncrustables the team eats. In summary, N.F.L. teams eat anywhere from 3,600 to 4,300 Uncrustables per week. When you include those eaten during training camp and those eaten by the eight teams that did not share their data, that’s at least 80,000 Uncrustables per year.

Uncrustables were invented in the mid-1990s by Len Kretchman, a former wide receiver at North Dakota State. His wife Emily suggested that he create a mass-produced peanut butter and jelly sandwich without the crust. This was easier said than done. But, after much trial and error, the circle-shaped frozen treat with jelly between layers of peanut butter was invented.

The history, according to tight end Dallas Clark, goes that, in 2003, the Indianapolis Colts may have been the first to add Uncrustables to “all that other healthy crap” the Colts provided players. The article highlights the players’ love of Uncrustables. For example, Kansas City Chiefs Travis Kelce claimed on his podcast that he eats more of them than “anything else in the world.”

The article concludes with a reference to Jon Torine, a former strength coach for the N.F.L.:

Torine and most nutritionists wouldn’t recommend frozen, processed peanut butter and jelly sandwiches as their No. 1 healthy snack option for players. But Uncrustables can do the job, especially when time is limited, and even nutritionists at the highest level of sports performance make compromises.

The bread and jelly give players quick carbohydrates. The peanut butter provides a little fat and a little protein. They’re easy to digest, convenient to eat, and a comfort food that players love (though there is wide disagreement as to whether grape or strawberry is the better jelly flavor — the correct answer is strawberry).

Here are some student headlines that capture the main idea of the graph: “Uncrustables: Secret to Victory or Just Another Snack?” by Wyatt of Vestavia Hills High School in Alabama; two headlines from Elk Rapids High School in Michigan: “Touchdowns and Snacks: Exploring the Surprising Connection Between N.F.L. Teams and Uncrustables” by Katie and “The N.F.L.’s Uncrustable Obsession” by Elisa; two headlines from Gull Lake High School in Richland, Mich.: “Are Uncrustables Eating Up the N.F.L.?” by Avonlea and “Uncrustables Becoming N.F.L.’s Halftime Snacks. “Will They SPREAD in Popularity” by Peyton Orley, Gull Lake High School; “Uncrustables and N.F.L. Wins: Do Snacks Really Shape Success?” by Lily of Academy of Saint Elizabeth in Convent Station, N.J.; “NFL’s Uncrustables Effect: A Bite-Sized Secret to Success?” By Daniel of Perth Amboy High School in New Jersey and “Do Uncrustables Fuel Football Victories?” by Claudia of New York.

You may want to think about these additional questions:

1. Scatter plots (see Stat Nugget below) display the relationship between two quantitative variables in terms of four criteria — direction, strength, form, and unusual observations. The above scatter plot (the second graph) was constructed from the Uncrustable data in the featured infographic and 2023 N.F.L. standings — two quantitative variables.

Describe the scatter plot using these four criteria.

What do you notice from this graph? What do you wonder?

Are the number of Uncrustables and the 2023 N.F.L. standing correlated (See Stat Nugget below)? What does the correlation or lack of correlation of the variables imply?

2. The article states:

The Colts also ate Uncrustables at halftime of Super Bowl XLI, when they beat the Bears 29-17. “So maybe that was the difference,” Torine said, laughing.

Review the data for the Indianapolis Colts and the Chicago Bears. Does the data support the conjecture made by Jon Torine, the Colts’ strength coach at the time?

Keep noticing and wondering. We continue to welcome your online responses.

The next graph will be about book bans across the United States. Live-moderation will take place on Wednesday, Jan. 8. By subscribing to the Learning Network newsletter here, you can receive notices of the “What’s Going On in This Graph?” releases on Fridays preceding Wednesday’s moderations.

Below, we define mathematical and statistical terms and how they relate to this graph. To see the archives of all Stat Nuggets with links to their graphs, go to this index.

An infographic (combines the words “information” and “graphic”) is a visual representation of information, including data and text. Infographics can make seeing patterns in data clearer.

The Uncrustables infographic displays the number of Uncrustables eaten per week in 2023 by N.F.L. teams. The ordering of the teams in terms of the descending number of Uncrustables eaten and the representation of Uncrustables in piles makes it easier to see that the Denver Broncos eat many more Uncrustables per week than any other team.

SCATTER PLOT

A scatter plot is a graph that is used to display the relationship between two quantitative variables and displays the direction, strength and form of the relationship, and unusual observations.

Direction: A positive direction means that the y-variable tends to increase as the x-variable increases (or an uphill trend). A negative direction means that the y-variable tends to decrease as the x-variable increases (or a downhill trend). Relationships between quantitative variables are said to have no direction when there is no consistent positive or negative pattern in the scatter plot.

Strength: The relationship between two quantitative variables runs from strong, if the points fall in a “tight” pattern, to weak, if they are spread out.

Form: The form of a relationship is determined by the pattern of the points in the scatter plot. The most common forms are linear and curved. If there is no apparent pattern in the scatter plot, the form is sometimes referred to as scattered.

Unusual observations: Unusual points that do not fit the general pattern in the scatter plot.

In the Uncrustables scatter plot, the quantitative variables are the number of Uncrustables eaten per week in 2023 by team on the x-axis and the team’s N.F.L. standing on the y-axis. There is no clear direction and the strength of the relationship is very weak. The form is scattered with one unusual point — the Denver Broncos, who eat 700 Uncrustables per week. There is almost no correlation (see Stat Nugget below) between the number of Uncrustables eaten per week in 2023 and 2023 N.F.L. standing.

CORRELATION

When displaying the relationship between two quantitative variables in a scatter plot (see Stat Nugget above), correlation measures the direction and strength of the linear relationship (see Stat Nugget below).

If two quantitative variables have a linear pattern, they are correlated. The strength of the linear relationship is quantified on a scale from 0 to 1. If a linear relationship is strong, the correlation is near 1. If a linear relationship is weak the correlation is near 0.

In the Uncrustables scatter plot, the relationship is not clearly positive or negative in direction, and the relationship is very weak. Therefore, the correlation between the number of Uncrustables eaten per week and N.F.L. standing is near 0.

LINEAR RELATIONSHIP

When displayed in a scatter plot (see Stat Nugget above), two quantitative variables are said to have a linear relationship when their points approximate a line. This relationship may be described by its strength on a spectrum from strong to weak. Data with a stronger linear relationship is said to have a stronger correlation.

In the Uncrustables scatter plot, there is not a strong linear relationship. There is close to no correlation between the number of Uncrustables eaten and the team’s 2023 N.F.L. standing.

The graph for “What’s Going On in This Graph?” was selected in partnership with Sharon Hessney. Ms. Hessney wrote the “reveal” and Stat Nuggets with Erica Chauvet, a mathematics professor at Waynesburg University in Pennsylvania, and moderates online with Liza Bondurant, an associate professor of secondary mathematics education at Mississippi State University in Starkville, Miss.