Clay Travis Asking Tim Tebow The Virginity Question At SEC Media Days Turns 14 Years Old

It's still one of those questions sports fans have not forgotten from the Tim Tebow college era: "Are you saving yourself for marriage?"

14 years ago this month, OutKick founder Clay Travis asked that very question and left the traditional sports media landscape gasping for air. This week, the video from that day in Birmingham, Alabama is making the rounds and should be reminding all OutKick employees of where this company came from.

By 2011, Clay understood he needed his own unfiltered website, OutKick, as a home base to go out and crush the traditional sports media outlets. 10 years later, he had scaled OutKick to one of the most dominant sports sites on the Internet and Fox News Corp. backed up a truck to make Clay filthy rich to where he hops on private jets and travels around the world.

Now I have a full-time job. There are like 40 full-timers (probably more, I've lost track) earning paychecks from this site. OutKick has multiple writers working in Nashville this week at SEC Media Days. We have retirement plans, health care, and vacation time. There are multiple levels of management and Clay now shares Rush Limbaugh's timeslot with Buck Sexton.

“My recollection is that most of the big Js said my career was over for asking that question," Clay told me Tuesday afternoon via text message after finishing up another day of his highly successful radio show. "Many of those guys are now unemployed and I’m a hundred millionaire. Not to brag, of course. I hate braggarts.”

Let's go back to that media room and watch how things played out between Clay and Tebow all those years ago:

Clay fired up his computer the next day to explain to the AOL FanHouse community why he asked the question.

“I asked because I believe it’s newsworthy and because, believe it or not, I thought Tim Tebow would answer the question by saying: “Yes, I am.” Which is exactly what he did," Clay told his audience.

“Why did I believe this? Because Tebow lives his faith. And I believe that living his faith is not artificial, he’s not pretending to be something he’s not. Further, I don’t believe that saving yourself for marriage is something to hide from. Not in the evangelical Christian faith that Tim Tebow practices in a Southern church and not in the evangelistic Southern church where I was raised.”

If we stop and think about it, OutKick was pretty much birthed at this very moment. When the Big Js zig, OutKick better zag. When the blue checkmarks tell you to get in line with COVID and listen to them because they're superior intellectuals and you're a simpleton, it's up to OutKick to zag. When dudes pretending to be chicks jump into a pool and rewrite college swimming record books, OutKick has to pump the brakes and speak up.

Al Tompkins, a longtime broadcast journalist across Kentucky and Tennessee, who went on to become a teacher at the Poynter Institute, hated Clay's question. Of course he did. Al was a Poynter intellectual elitist who couldn't see what was coming in the early days of blogging.

"If Tebow had brought up his faith during the news conference, or if he had launched an abstinence campaign, the question would have been fair game. But this was SEC Media Day, and that’s the wrong time and the wrong place to bring up a player’s sex life," Tompkins wrote soon after the press conference.

The nerds at SB Nation (are they out of business yet?) hated it. Bleacher Report was appalled.

Veteran Big J Tony Barnhart was pissed.

"The reporters in the room, at least the ones with integrity, were clearly uncomfortable at the line of questioning," Barnhart pontificated for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

Yahoo! hated it. CBS Sports...hated it.

Perhaps the best reaction from that era came from Joe Walljasper of the Columbia Daily Tribune, who wrote:

"Give Tebow credit for answering with aplomb, but should he have been put in that position? Does it matter that Tebow is an amateur athlete, albeit a veteran of countless interviews? Does it matter that the person asking the question was an avowed Tennessee Volunteers fan and an irreverent humorist who has written, “I firmly believe that Florida Gator women carry six to eight extra pounds of arm fat on the back of their arms,” as opposed to a writer from a Christian publication?

By 2017, Walljasper was out at the newspaper, and in 2022, he penned his farewell column to Missouri Rivals readers.

It's true, hero is thrown around quite a bit these days, but Clay's performance that day in 2009 was right up there with some of the great non-military hero moments in American pop culture history.

It's imperative that all of us at OutKick #neverforget.