Sports Fans are Nerds.

As I sit here watching the BCS National Football Championship*, I'm also watching social networks.

*Note: Nick Saban has proven he's the Prince of Darkness -- or at least commander of an Army of Darkness. He used his dark magics to strike down Colt McCoy, his opponent's star quarterback early in the first quarter. The game itself is pretty boring, and it looks pretty good for the SEC. But there are plenty of sports blogs, and I know very little about the subject. Still, go SEC.

As I keep my eye on Facebook and Twitter, it's becoming more and more obvious to me that hardcore sports fans are just nerds.

As I see it, there are two general archetypes of sports fans. There are those who played sports and there are those who didn't.

The first category is made up of former high-school/junior high/little league players who enjoyed playing the game. They got to enjoy playing the game because they were competing against average human beings. Average human beings, of course, are slow, weak and uncoordinated. Professional athlets are freakishly muscled behemoths that somehow manage to move with inhuman precision in a way and at a speed that several hundred pounds of flesh have no right to do.

So, once a young athlete realizes that they are not that rare combination of brute force and finesse that makes a great athlete, he finds something in "The Real World" to do for a living.

The draw of competitive sports, however (which, as a decidedly athletically challenged individual, I never picked up and sometimes have trouble fully comprehending) sticks with them. This becomes obvious as they move on to later life.

It's especially obvious in college, where many of these former athletes are fresh out of that life. The stereotypes are pretty consistent: former basketball players who spend the vast majority of their life in athletic shorts and some form of t-shirt; football players who maintain a strict workout regimen aimed at preserving their tacklin' muscles (thoughts on weightlifting later); soccer players who, upon seeing a field, cannot resist the urge to run around barefoot and bounce things around with their feet.

This is in no way a condemnation. I'm a band nerd 3 years out of the much-beloved bandstand, and if marching bands were as popular as football teams, I'd be in exactly the same situation. In fact, I pretty much do exactly what my sports fan friends do during the game during a halftime show.

But that's exactly my point.

The only thing that seperates a sports fan from any other breed of nerd is their sphere of expertise. Especially when you look at those who have reached middle age, the average sports fan is hardly a paragon of physical fitness. They know players like music or art afficianados know great artists. They learn plays and formations like video gamers learn attack combos or RTS* strategies. And they memorize as many or more stats as a tabletop roleplayer.

*RTS: Real Time Strategy. A type of video game involving resource collection and unit command. Noob.

Am I saying this is bad? OF COURSE NOT. I'm only trying to say that it's ironic when sports fans look down on those who follow other activities with similar zeal.