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| Of course Tom Brady gets extra dice because of stats bonuses. |
Suppose I told you that I spent the week looking at the stats of my team (party) in order to choose the best combination to defeat my opponent. There's skill involved on the player's part to be sure, but a large amount of luck also goes into being successful (a roll of the dice you might say). I'm either talking about Dungeons & Dragons or Fantasy Sports.
Certainly a nerd was behind the creation of this wondrous past-time, but it has grown so much farther than that. It's hard to watch a football game without the commentators, at least one of whom is certainly a former player himself, talk about the fantasy implications of that game, and likely mention their own fantasy teams. In fact I would wager that a majority of serious football fans have at least one fantasy football team. While certainly not as popular fantasy football, fantasy versions of other major sports are constantly growing in popularity as well.
How did this happen? Surely, no one sat down a jock and said, "I know a way to take this game you love to watch and play, reduce it to a collection of stats that you have to constantly watch, force you to monitor off-field trivia, and constantly monitor trends beyond game-time happenings. Large parts of it will require you to be on the internet." Somehow though, we've captured a large sector of the otherwise non-nerd community with an activity that is quite distinctly nerdy. Huzzah for us.
Mysterious set-ups aside, I think the answer is obvious. Being a nerd is nothing more than loving something so much that you want to know everything about it (note, something not someone, that's stalking). You can be a nerd about anything. There are sports nerds just like there are comic nerds, computer nerds, and movie nerds. It's obsession in a way, but less creepy. But just as socially awkward. When people love sports, tracking all of the stats is an inevitable extension of that and once you track all of those stats, you're going to want to do something with them. Fantasy sports are simply proof that anyone can be a nerd, and one more example of the ways that being a nerd is cool.
Some Notes: I hope those of you that are less inclined toward sports made it through this post. It's obviously less about sports than it is about one more way in which I am nerdy. Hopefully you found it interesting, because I'm here for entertainment. For those of you who also play Fantasy Football, I bet my team is outscoring your team.