"Nerds vs Jocks" is a trope that bugs me to no end because my experience in school and afterwards is that jocks are better than average. I never got bullied by a jock, in fact, when people tried to ambush me at my dorm I ducked into the room of the captain of the rugby team and that was the last time anybody tried to ambush me at my dorm.
I have to mostly agree with you, in the sense that the jocks were no less nice than anybody else, maybe even more so. That's a pretty low bar for teenagers, though. Furthermore, the jocks by and large didn't really understand the misery of bullying, so they treated it lightly, and they did more than their share.
In my typology of bullies, there's the archetypal "unhappy at home" kind of bully who is troubled and traumatized and takes it out on other people. After-school specials will teach you that all bullies are like that, but in my experience, they were relatively rare in real life. The more common type, who accounted for almost all of the bullying, were the "protecting community standards" bullies, who were happy and popular and bullied people as a public service, sometimes even for the good of the victim. When people did something disruptive or destructive to the community, like being gay, thinking they were as good as people that they weren't as good as, or talking to a jock's girlfriend, the community needed to be repaired, and the violator needed to be put on a more healthy path in life. As budding community leaders, the jocks naturally stepped into that role, especially when physical work was required.
I managed to escape bullying in high school by being incredibly bland and repressing any inappropriate social ambitions (i.e., any at all) but I could see from cases around me that if there had been anything socially disturbing about me, a strong effort would have been made to correct the situation.
With my C64 arriving in 9th grade, and my being a pretty good wrestler, I was both.
My sophomore year, when getting a ride from my state champion teammate, I don't know what I said, but he just turned to me and said,
"McCall, you're a neeeerrrrrd."
It wasn't bullying, because I've never been bullied, but I was -- and am -- a nerd.
And, yeah, "Real Genius" got a lot of play on HBO back then. I especially loved the Lazlo storyline, and "Everybody Wants to Rule the World" is such a GREAT song.