You shouldn't be surprised by what I'm about to tell you, but I LOVE stats.  I've said before and I'll say it again: If I could go back to school, I would study interior design and statistics.  They'll never cross over in the real world, but there's physical and spatial beauty in interior design, while stats provide a beauty in truth.

Stat don't lie.

One could easily misconstrue the meaning of the stat being presented, but they can't lie about the actual number it arose.  And that's why stats are so powerful and beautiful.  They can take the abstract and make it concrete, and then we have the power to make it abstract again.  They aren't a meaning to an end, but merely a powerful, powerful tool to help us come to a conclusion (or at least think we did).

That's why this entry is so exciting for me.  If you go to the Stats tab, you'll now see a fresh new stat sheet for you guys to play with all season long.  It only took me about four to five hours to make the doc (the beauties of funemployment), but it was completely worth it.  Let's go over a quick rundown of what you'll find on this here stat sheet.

1. You'll immediately notice the colored tables.  The black one will display overall stats throughout the season.  The blue ones will be stats for individual weeks as evidenced by the upper left headlines.  
2. There are some new stats for this year.  ESPN just doesn't know what they're doing with stats, but NFL.com does.  They introduced some fun stats last year, and I've mimicked these in our spreadsheet.  
• The first new stat is the Breakdown Rank.  The Breakdown Rank is basically what I like to call the  Screwed Factor.  It looks at the total amount of points you scored and compares it to everyone else's for that week.  So, for example, if you lost 111-110, but had the second-highest Breakdown Rank of anyone else, you're rank would be 2.  That means you would have beaten every team except one for that week.  It's an insult to injury type of stat at times.
• The second one - and my personal favorite - is the Coach stat.  This stat tells you how many points your optimal lineup would've gotten you.  So say you scored 78 points, but your bench QB outscored your starter 15-5.  Your optimal lineup would've gotten you 88 points, so the 88 would show up in your Coach stat.  88 still may not have gotten you the 105 needed to beat your opponent, but hey, that doesn't mean you couldn't have played your lineup better.
• The final stat is a summation stat.  The True Rank factors in your Breakdown Rank, Coach stat, Points Scored, and actual record to help determine your overall positioning in the league.  Think of it as the most unbiased way to show how good your team is.  And it makes sense.  If your team is scoring a ton of points, your putting in your best possible lineups to do so, and it's showing in the win column, then you're True Rank will be pretty darn good.
3. On top of those direct rip-offs from NFL.com's fantasy page, I've added a breakdown of your points by position over the course of a week and season.  So if you want to see if you're running back tandem outscored the league for X week, then you can see it.  Or you can check to see if you've gotten the most TE production even if you've been switching TE's every week.  You can also check to see how many points you've left on the bench.  

I'll have to manually update these stats every Tuesday after all the games are said and done.  And I'll love doing it because I get to look at stats.  However, and I've mentioned this before, this means I won't be writing many, if any, previews for the following week.  I'm going to be spending more time doing background stuff, but I'll still use these stats for the recap in the Danny Devito Power Rankings every week.  So if you're going to want to do a preview, then by all means I would love to see it.