When Clay Travis was last on our radar, it was for his role in bravely protecting Tennessee from hiring Greg Schiano to succeed Butch Jones by insinuating that Schiano was part of covering up for Jerry Sandusky at Penn State. Oddly, the Fox Sports radio host’s altruistic crusade for justice did not compel him to speak up as strongly against Rutgers hiring Schiano this offseason, but even Superman can only be so many places at once.

Clay is making more waves as one of the last truly apolitical sports media personalities in the time of COVID-19. As a relentless tide of sensationalistic, headline-chasing media, politically-motivated sportswriters and sniveling, fearmongering bloggers continues to crash against the shores of reason with their never-ending cries of caution, the lighthouse of truth that is Clay Travis shines his all-penetrating beacon of objectivity across the dark and stormy waters of the discourse.

While the rest of the sports world wants you to believe that the July outbreaks of COVID-19 mattered, only Clay Travis is reasonable enough to tell you that they in fact don’t because the death rate is much lower than what New York experienced back before hospitals were equipped to deal with an influx of COVID patients. Sports writers want you to believe this is a crisis, but we’re only losing around 1,000 Americans per day to this disease now, and that number isn’t even increasing very quickly.

I’m doing Clay a disservice by digressing. This discussion of deaths is too politics-adjacent. We’re here to talk about sports.

Clay has done his best to fight off the so-called “coronabros” in the sports media sphere — the vast majority of sportswriters who are clearly, for various reasons, cynically rooting against the return of football and trying to prevent football from coming to pass in the fall by amplifying their alarmist narratives — by pointing out the low death rate of the age groups college and pro athletes fall into. He has a point in that is is pretty insidious for the media to continue to spin this narrative that COVID-19 poses anything more than a mild inconvenience to athletes; Illinois runningback Ra’von Bonner fell for this narrative so hard that he’s opted out of the season because of asthma-related concerns.

Of course, that’s asthma. That’s different. Maybe people with COVID risk factors should never have been playing at this level to begin with. It’s not for everyone, and we can’t pretend we can make a soft, inclusive, non-competitive world where the likes of Cameron Heyward, Emmitt Smith, Jerome Bettis, Dennis Rodman and David Beckham can compete at the highest levels of athletics. Among the other so-called “risk factors” the coronabros want you to be concerned about? High body mass index.

Can you believe that? They think that because people with high BMI are at risk, FOOTBALL PLAYERS are at risk!

Photo by John Byrum/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images

How ridiculous. As though you’d even make a top-flight football team with a super-high BMI.

Photo by Dan Sanger/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images

I mean, we’re talking about world-class athletes in the primes of their lives, not fat people who need help breathing.

Kim Klement-USA TODAY Sports

Still, in spite of how trivial the concerns over COVID-19 actually are, tons of NFL players, especially interior linemen (for some reason), are already opting out of the 2020 season because they’ve bought into the idea that the disease poses a threat. Even if no NCAA or conference guidance comes down soon, teams may have their hands forced by growing numbers of defectors.

This is where Clay Travis can save college football!

Clay Travis is our last hope in the fight to save football and is already a leader in this field. He’s said himself how important he is in this struggle:

Tons of [sports leadership figures] agree with me. But they are afraid of being crushed by the coronabro media mob on here if they say it. Twitter has created an atmosphere where emotion overrides facts, anecdotal outliers outweigh data. And our national discourse is broken as a result.

But of course, these sports leadership figures have to be risk-averse and keep the media mob at bay. They can’t just come out and say how overblown this is and how no athletes are going to actually suffer any long term effects. That’s why they...no, ALL of us, need Clay to take center stage in this fight!

If Clay Travis, a healthy and courageous man of true manliness, were to go out and contract COVID-19 and then chronicle, with medical expert commentary and real documentation, himself kicking the disease’s ass and suffering no ill effects, the sports media mob would have no choice but to surrender and allow football to proceed uninterrupted!

Clay would come out the other side of this one of the most respected figures in media, someone who actually put his money where his mouth was and proved scientifically his thesis:

Life comes with risks. The risk to healthy people from the coronavirus is nearly zero. You — and others like you — don’t ever have to leave your houses again if that makes you feel better. The rest of us need to get back to work, school & life.

A coward like Darren Rovell would never do this. I don’t have a big enough platform to make a difference (my asthma history notwithstanding).

But Clay has nothing to lose (since there’s no risk to him) and everything to gain (becoming THE MAN WHO SAVED COLLEGE FOOTBALL).

Perhaps I can’t include the Maryland, Rutgers or Michigan State contingents in this conclusion, but as a blog made up of hobbyists who do this in their spare time and are pumping out 20-odd articles a week previewing a 2020 football season that’s in grave danger, I can PROMISE you that we, Off Tackle Empire, are NOT rooting for football to be cancelled. We want it to happen in the worst way.

Help us, Clay Travis. You’re our only hope.