We're almost halfway through our fantasy regular season and I sure hope you are playing to win, unlike a couple coaches that appear in our Week 6 Scouting Notebook.

Frank Gore(notes) is really explosive and just so tough. He had little help in Motown with Alex Smith averaging 3.9 yards per attempt. That's tough sledding. But he's the man on all downs except when getting a breather. So even though the QB environment isn't good – we want passers that move the chains and create easy scoring opportunities – the team environment (defense and coaching) is very good. If I had any idea that Jim Harbaugh would be this good a NFL coach (projecting college success is pointless, history proves), I would have had Gore as a top-five back easy. Now all Gore has to do is dodge the injury demons, which are always lurking given his running style.

I like my coaches too fired up to deal with the formality of a post-game handshake and I guarantee you his players do, too.

In this watered down RB year,

Let's start this Week 5 Scouting Notebook with one of the most entertaining games of the day, where Cam Newton(notes) and the Panthers gave the Saints all they could handle.

Jimmy Graham(notes) is the No. 1 tight end in fantasy football because he's so consistently targeted. He's far and away the primary weapon in a volume passing offense. Now Sean Payton will start getting crafty and use him as a decoy.

Newton owners like it when a replay review reverses a TD and puts the ball down at the one. Five rushing TDs is ridiculous. Michael Vick(notes) was, and is, a way better runner than Newton, but Newton is a weapon on the goal line, where Vick was never special. He's longer and bigger than any back and thus is money in the bank near the stripe, rushing for a TD every eight carries. This all makes Jonathan Stewart(notes) worthless – he didn't get a carry the first half.

Tim Tebow's(notes) release is so slow he almost couldn't clock the ball before time expired. Is Tebow a poor man's

Got questions this week on Twitter @MichaelSalfino from panicked Chris Johnson owners, who are not fans of Matt Hasselbeck(notes), I guarantee it. I think they will be soon enough, though. Hasselbeck has looked good and that will ultimately be a positive to Johnson, who like all backs needs volume and thus QBs who can convert some third and longs. Johnson especially needs it because there are those 70-yard jaunts out there if the Titans roll the dice with him enough. Sunday's 100-plus-yard day with a 25-yard run is a small step in the right direction.

Of course, 80-yard touchdowns from tight ends get our attention. Jared Cook(notes) profiles as a hybrid at 6-foot-5, 248 pounds with good speed. The Titans plan on using him as a third wideout and we want our tight ends to be standing in the slot far away from blocking assignments on key passing downs. There is significant upside here with Kenny Britt(notes) out.

The Titans also gives us a pretext to grade our first Football by the

Lots of fantasy points on the waiver wires in Week 3 and let's start there.

Giants WR Victor Cruz(notes) is, like me, from Paterson, NJ via Paterson Catholic, which no longer even has a football team. That's a tough town. And Cruz plays a lot bigger than 6-foot and really can go and get the ball, as demonstrated last preseason when he scored three times against the Jets. Move him into your lineup in deep leagues on weeks when Hakeem Nicks(notes) or Mario Manningham(notes) are out. If starting, he'll have about as good a shot as about half the top 40 receivers.

Texans TE/RB James Casey(notes) is very interesting. Here's the key takeaway from his draft profile:

"Compares To: WES WELKER(notes), New England meets DALLAS CLARK(notes), Casey's pass catching ability is on par with Clark's, but he does not have the size and blocking skills to be considered a traditional tight end."

Torrey Smith(notes)? Well, nine out of 10 rookie wideouts are beat once defenses pay even a little attention to

Our very special guest in this week's Football by the Numbers is someone uniquely qualified to guide us on our quest to find meaning in about 12 percent of a season's worth of stats – Paul Bessire of PredictionMachine.com, a website that projects fantasy statistics based on 50,000 simulations of each game.

We start with the passing game explosion. In 2010, passing yards increased about six percent from 2000-2009 average. That seemed remarkable. Until this year – 246 yards per game thus far on average and a 11 percent increase from just last year and a 18 percent increase from the 2000-2009 average. Can it continue?

No, says Bessire. He projects passing to hold steady at 57 percent of plays for the balance of the year (it was 55 percent in 2010, up from 52 percent in 1990 and 49 percent in 1980). But the yards per pass that is currently 7.6 is expected to decline to 6.69 for the balance of the year, much closer to the 6.57 2010 average.

However, he still has 11 QBs throwing for 4,000+

Sorry Jamaal Charles(notes) owners, but it was looking like an ugly season anyway. Of course, nothing is as ugly as a Week 2 torn ACL. But Kansas City is a horror show now, with and especially without him.

Arian Foster(notes) owners are feeling blue about their first-round pick, too. Unlike Charles owners, though, they will have a much harder time turning the page as they continue to read injury updates for hidden clues. Don't play him again until he makes it through a game. Hey, don't shoot the messenger. You went and made this mess for yourself.

Cam Newton was viewed by some wise speculators as a poor-man's Michael Vick(notes). But maybe Vick will turn out to be the poor man's Newton. Back-to-back 400-plus-yard passing games right out of the box is outside the realm of projections. This is firmly his team, with 46 pass attempts in a game that never was desperate and, amazingly, about as many rushing attempts as DeAngelo Williams(notes) and Jonathan Stewart(notes) combined.

Newton is

Football by the Numbers is a very tough column to write after Week 1. The sample size is so small. And it's also very distorted by factors that are more likely than any after any other week to be random.

But when in doubt, the safest approach is to just pull the data that I would most want to shape early season decisions. What would I put the most stock in right now after one week? I like run/pass splits the first half of games.

Think about it: Teams have been game-planning all summer. What did they want to do to open their season, when preference and not score is most likely to be operational? Here, perhaps, the fact that it's the first game actually gives more meaning to these stats because there was an entire offseason of preparation that went into planning for it.

The inspiration for this was a note in the Week 1 Scouting Notebook about Matt Ryan(notes). In the Falcons third preseason game (the one preseason game that is an actual dress rehearsal) when Ryan threw 42 first-half

We've waited so long for real NFL action that the natural tendency is to invest too much meaning into Week 1. But it's all we have as we kick off 2011, Scouting Notebook style.

Remembering that Matt Ryan(notes) threw 42 passes in the first half of the one non-dress rehearsal preseason game, note Atlanta had 17 passes and 9 rushes in the first half. Let's assume score did not dictate play-calling in quarters one and two. That's 65 percent passes. The average team last year had about 1,000 plays from scrimmage. That's 650 passing plays. At an average rate of about seven yards per attempt, we get 4,500 passing yards for Ryan. When life gives you lemons, Ryan and Roddy White(notes) owners, make lemonade.

We have a lot of data on Rex Grossman(notes). And the Giants defense was very undermanned. So the one week isn't going to sway me. But it intrigues me. All of a sudden, you're thinking, "Hey, Mike Shanahan is a guru …" So the glass is at least looking half full. None of their skill players