Who's your daddy?

 

Our daddy is none other than the Cold, Hard Football Facts collection of Quality Stats, who rule the house of pigskin with a gridiron hand.

 

Our daddy is also a hard-working breadwinner who keeps a roof over our heads and food on our table. (And, if you've seen us eat, that's no small feat.) Each week, we pile up the Quality Stats on the biggest and most competitive games and publish our findings for you, our suckling little pupils of pigskin. So far, we're 16-7 (.696) picking winners in these games. The Las Vegas favorites in these very same games have won just 12 times (we're not talking about beating the spread – we're just talking about favorites actually winning the game).

 

Think of that ... In the league's most competitive games this year, Vegas can pick the winners (by favoring them) barely 50 percent of the time. We're racking up winners at nearly a 70 percent clip. If you listen to your daddy, you're eating well so far this season.

 

Daddy's most important job is to provide important life lessons to his football family: Don't cheat, don't steal and be nice to others – except maybe Oakland fans.

 

He has also taught us not to lie and is here to correct those little football fibs that fill the seedy underworld of online pigskin analysis.

 

Daddy's pigskin wisdom: The productivity of Cincy's all-star ensemble-cast passing attack has been merely mediocre so far this season. They average a pedestrian 200 passing yards per game, which puts them 16th in the league, behind powerhouse offenses such as Detroit, San Francisco and Tennessee. Yardage, of course, is an empty stat, one that doesn't mean a whole lot at the end of the day. But even in the all-important passing yards per attempt figure, the Bengals are a mere 13th. They average just 6.25 yards every time they drop back to pass – far behind the league-leading Bears (8.37 YPA).

 

 

Daddy's pigskin wisdom: The Patriots' offense certainly isn't going to win any beauty pageants this season. But the team's defensive futility has quietly flown under the radar. New England ranks 26th in defensive passer rating (94.0), 28th in third-down conversion percentage (opponents have converted 46.7 percent of their attempts) and dead last with just one takeaway in three games. The defensive passer rating figure is especially dreadful considering the quarterbacks the Patriots have faced so far this season – the jittery J.P. Losman, the glass-shouldered Chad Pennington and the erratic Jake Plummer, who was on the proverbial hot seat before shredding the inept New England pass defense for 256 yards and two back-breaking TDs.

 

Daddy's pigskin wisdom: Scoreability is a brilliant way to measure a team's capabilities. Look at the Cold, Hard Football Facts Scoreability Index, a measure of offensive efficiency. Notice something about the top seven teams on the list? Oh yeah, they're the NFL's seven undefeated teams. Teams that score efficiently – whether the points come from offense, defense, special teams or some combination thereof – will win a lot of games.

 

Daddy's pigskin wisdom: Favre apologists were delighted by his 340-yard, 3-TD, 127.1-passer-rating performance against Detroit, saying it's a sign that the old gunslinger still has a few silver bullets left in his holster. The truth is that the Lions have the worst pass defense in football – a brutal 127.3 defensive passer rating – and are on pace to shatter the all-time record for pass-defense futility set by the 1984 Vikings (104.5). Remember, just one week earlier, Chicago's Rex Grossman posted a near-perfect passer rating of 148.0 against the Lions (20 for 29, 289 yards, 4 TDs, 0 INTs).

 

 

Daddy's pigskin wisdom: Well, his Texans certainly suck more than Holly So Tightly in "Dirt Merchant." But Carr is quietly having a remarkable season. Despite relentless pressure (10 sacks), he's tossed 6 TD passes and just 1 INT and leads the entire NFL with a 113.6 passer rating. That's 17 points higher than Peyton Manning and 20.7 points higher than Carson Palmer.