In honor of football season, in this week's Tap That App, we look at theScore, probably the only sports app you'll ever need to track your favorite sports, teams and players.

theScore sets a high standard for any other sports tracking app, and it caters to the two completely opposite sides of the sports fan spectrum and does it very well. That's because theScore is designed to do what many apps -- sports or otherwise -- often fail at: offering an overwhelming amount of information on a broad subject while also making it easy to whittle down the information overload into something simple that only gives you what you need.

On the one hand, you have casual sports fans like yours truly. Maybe you grew up with a couple favorite teams that you want to keep track of (Go Bears! C'mon Bulls!), and perhaps you joined a fantasy football league and need to track players on other teams you don't necessarily care about.

On the other extreme, you have super fans ("daaaa Bears") that want to know every single aspect of a half-dozen different sports while tracking dozens of players for multiple fantasy leagues and keeping up on major developments in a couple of more esoteric sports.

The impressive thing about theScore is that it's perfect for both.

theScore provides detailed stats and tracking for major professional American sports like Football, Canadian Football, fúbol everywhere else, college sports, MMA, Formula 1 racing, tennis, golf... You get the idea. You can get live updates of major breaking news for leagues, players, or teams, or every major score -- and get leaderboards, standings, scores, recaps, and statistics galore for every game, match, race or what have you.

But you can also narrow all of that information down to just a few players, a single league, or only your favorite team with a feature called MyScore, and you can customize alerts to get scores, end of game information and breaking news. Or, if you're trying to live spoiler-free while taping the game, you can turn all of those off easily.

(Photo : Robert Schoon)

And if you're away from the TV but want to know the latest, theScore also provides live feeds of developments in games, along with useful but also aesthetically pleasing visualizations of statistics from the game, teams, significant plays, and players.

Visualizations of matchups in the NFL are particularly nice this year, as theScore has been updated to provide a nice graphical display of every major scoring drive for any given game, along with a recap of major stats and a separate visualization of the key play in each drive.

(Photo : Robert Schoon)

All of this is done with an interface that's surprisingly simple to use, and you'll find yourself setting it up to cater specifically for your individual interests within a couple minutes of opening the app for the first time.

Case in point, after deleting sports you'd want to know about in the league editor settings, you'll have a list of your favorite leagues on the left side hamburger menu (even on Android, the app is clearly designed for iOS first). But you can instantly reorder those leagues from most important to least right within that menu, just by dragging and dropping. That's great for multi-league fans who want to prioritize their app at any given time of year.

(Photo : Robert Schoon)

As a sports news app, theScore is pretty nice too. The emphasis here is on just the essentials: simple and good-looking.

(Photo : Robert Schoon)

News articles are seldom more than three paragraphs long, and they provide just what you need to know about the leagues you're following -- look to LatinPost Sports, Grantland or Sports Illustrated for the longer, in-depth stuff.

theScore isn't perfect, and I found myself wishing the app's MMA section was separated into leagues. I also wish you could follow individual fighters the way you can with players in other sports.

But those are nitpicks on what's overall simultaneously the most comprehensive and the most welcoming, tailor-made sports app out there. And it's available for Android, iOS, along with Windows and Blackberry for free.

Check out theScore for iOS and Android, which both got an update late last week to provide those real-time NFL scoring drive graphics.