My new favorite blog is the Pro Football Reference blog. Why? Great data -- which you can download -- with fun, informative, and even playful analysis, with a generous dose of putting interesting math to use, on a topic I can't help but care about more than I should.

When I was little I used to love watching the numbers go up and down on the sports pages - baseball and football in particular, but also basketball and hockey. Well, heck, who am I kidding, I *still* love watching the numbers go up and down on the sports pages. Sometime around when I turned 11 or 12 I started reading the stock pages too... turned into a pretty good picker, though I didn't really have much money at the time, or I'd be way farther up the "leisure class" scale by now. (I told a lot of people to buy Cisco Systems in the early 1990s... but did they LISTEN?)

When games are on I'm always calculating little bits in my head... "okay now Barry's averaging 9 yards per carry on downs when he gains yards and -2 when he loses." I often think that most other people do, because occasionally an announcer will, when a slugger HRs in his first five games, or when a rookie forward scores in his first six games, say something like "he's on a pace to hit 162 this year chuckle chuckle" or "even on his current pace to score 80 goals he'll still fall short of Gretzky's 92, Bob, eh."

Fortunately, on the internet, nobody knows you're a sports stat geek... except the other sports stat geeks.