I also am not a big believer in STATS. They can always be skewed to make a team look bad/good. A great example of that is the year we played the Rams in the SB.....Journalists kept pointing out how bad our offense/defense was compared to the Rams...But the truth was, we were one of the highest scoring and least scored upon teams in the NFL that year. I think we were the 6th highest scoring offense and 5th toughest defense to be scored upon that year. YPG as an indicator is simply a joke to me, same as the BCS rankings.
Although I am not a huge Troy Aikman fan, he has put together an index which
more precisely indicates a teams stregnth and I would put more stock in his rankings (no matter where the Pats rank) thank any other.
Here's how we rank after week 8:
http://www.nfl.com/news/story/9770079