Don't things ever strike you as potentially very useful before you think of a specific use case?

In this case, it's bound to be useful when you're building interfaces for webapps, to let you do new things.

For instance, an onlline clone of Football Manager where gamers want to examine the stats of the players in the other team, but from a whole lot of different perspectives: graphically in formation, or in a list sorted in differrent ways. The animations may not be essential there but they certainly don't hurt. Games compete for their visual fidelity.

I run an online Football (american) sim, and I am sitting here dreaming up how to use it.

I hadn't considered the stats, that's interesting. Same could be said for the draft, and free agency.

Both are really hard to order, and see useful data that way. I'll have a lot of variations though, and a lot of items. Just the draft is 384 rows(players)

Not sure how appropriate this is to American Football, but it'd be a neat way to transform between different team formations that the user wants to try.

That's true, I hadn't considered that. You could also group them in some interesting ways like that.

The thing is, I wouldn't want to move pictures like that though. They'd actually be tables to move like that, so the user could move the tables around, and then make selections within those tables.

You're always making some choice with an American Football game. A lot of ordered data is what it comes down to.