> I've had a couple girlfriends who made fun of me enjoying hockey and college football, but after explaining the depth of the strategy, and how the football game is much less about the guys running into each other, and much more about the chess game the coaches are playing against each other

That part interests you more, maybe. One of the reasons sports have such wide appeal is that they can be appreciated in a number of different ways. Coaching and long term strategy is interesting for sure, but there's a lot to see just between players too.

Watching a professional basketball game, for example, I'm astounded by the pure, freak strength and athleticism of these six-and-a-half-foot-tall giants as they dunk, struggle for position for rebounds and leap across the court to block shots. I'm in awe of the mental discipline and social coordination the players need to successfully execute a defensive scheme or offensive play: split-second reads of their opponents' schemes, precise spatial awareness of their teammates and opposing players, and the ability to communicate effectively with teammates amid the roar of an NBA arena at full capacity.

Football isn't the same as basketball but the players are doing a lot more than just "running into each other." As one example, wide receivers are often engaged in tactical mind-games with defensive backs, fighting for the millisecond-grained advantage off the line of scrimmage that makes the difference between a touchdown and an intercepted pass. They have to execute cuts down the field on their routes with incredibly precise timing matching the quarterback's or risk causing an incompletion or worse. All players spend hundreds of hours a season in the film room studying their opponents, looking for tendencies and tells to exploit in the coming game.

Have you considered the possibility that this overt faux-ignorance might be in response to a situation where:

a) everyone expects you to know the difference between a safety touch and a free safety

and

b) no one knows the difference between muonium and muonic hydrogen (a difference I myself just learned today)

and

c) if you do know the difference between muonium and muonic hydrogen you instantly get treated with contempt?

I'm not sure that this is the case, but having lived my whole life in a world that treats almost everything I care about with overt and sometimes violent contempt, I can certainly see people who care more about art, science, literature or poetry acting out a bit to give the rest of the world the feeling they have when they try to talk to anyone about anything that matters to them.

You are projecting. Someone doesn't share your interests, or finds sports boring. It really, really doesn't mean they think they're clever, or "too good". That implies that secretly, they like sports but just get off on pretending not to like them to be elitist. But it's simply untrue.

Sorry you have a grievance with your exes who were bored by your preoccupation with sports. Nobody is obligated to share your interests any more than you are obligated to share a certain autistic person's interest in trains. If you find talking about models of trains boring, that's your right. Period.