Along with sports changing over time, the nature of sports fans have changed too.  The way we consume sports certainly has changed with television and the Internet.  It got me wondering how much of a sports fan I would have been if I hadn’t grown up in this day and age.  I love watching the games, but I would be lying if I had an insane attention to detail.  I have never had an affinity for memorizing statistics either.

I had a roommate in college who was insane with his photographic memory.  He could close his eyes and tell you all the last 20 Super Bowl winners based on a poster he had on his wall.  He could tell you what the Jets did in each of their games last year because he had looked at a page with all the weeks and results laid out.  Back in the old days of being a sports fan, that kind of talent made you an expert.  If you could spout off statistics from famous Yankees off the back of their baseball cards, you were revered in the sports world for having such an encyclopedic knowledge.

I was never cut out to be that guy, yet here I am in the modern age with the ability to write articles and engage other sports fans as something of an authority* because I spend so much time working at it.  The value of skill sets has shifted away from people needing to memorize things and more toward analysis, communication ability and ability to engage an audience.  Still, part of the reason that I can do this is that I am pretty handy with a computer, researching, consolidating information, analyzing it, putting an opinion around it and writing it up. [Read more...]