Outkicked the coverage with Clay Travis live every week day morning from 6 to 9 a.m. Eastern 3 to 6 a.m. Pacific on Fox Sports Radio. Find your local station for outkicked the coverage at Fox Sports Radio dot com or stream us live every morning on the I hard radio app by searching FSR.

You're listening to Fox Sports Radio. We are tracking down a bunch of different stories out there in particular the ongoing drama of Dishon Watson. I know many of you by the way in the state of Texas listening to this show right now it's unbelievable how many people have been without power in Texas. Hopefully the deep freeze that is set in all over the country is going to be over soon.

We are in the middle of a second winter storm warning in Nashville. The snow was going on all day yesterday. It has continued through the night. I mean, it doesn't happen in Nashville a full week of activity. It's kind of crazy to be following in general.

But it is ongoing and it is wacky and it does not seem like it is leaving anytime soon almost the entire country in the middle of a deep freeze. But there is a positive out there and the positive is this sports at least in the world of baseball are close to being back close to being very, very normal.

And I don't know if if a lot of you are paying as close of attention to this as I am, but in Arizona and Florida spring training is underway with pitchers and catchers reporting.

And with pitchers and catchers reporting and a hundred and 62 game schedule on tap, we are close, I believe, to getting back to as close to 100% normalcy as we possibly could be in terms of where we are headed in the in the larger universe of sports.

And if that happens, I think one of the first questions that's going to be out there is will people go to sporting events again in the same numbers.

And if they do, will they how long will it take to get back to normal? And look, the data is out there. I saw the reports that everybody who's going to want a COVID vaccine is going to be able to get it by the end of July.

Regardless of your age. And if you are older and that's obviously who has been the most at risk of serious complications from COVID, if you are older, then then you hopefully have already had access to the vaccine.

Hopefully everybody who is elderly nursing homes, everybody else is getting vaccinated. And if that occurs, then the overall death rate, which is begun to decline precipitously already, overall hospitalization rates, overall number of positive cases, all of that is just fallen off a cliff.

Right. There was there were big numbers that started in November and kind of climbed and were back down basically to summer levels now in terms of people who are having issues with COVID in terms of hospitalizations, all that stuff.

I think we're back down around 60,000 people in the entire country are hospitalized right now with COVID. And so knock on wood, you would hope with over 50 million people having received at least their first vaccination.

And many of those vaccinations having gone to people who are elderly or of advanced age and having the most danger that basically the bottom is going to fall out of any sort of danger and everything can open back up in short order.

I put up a poll yesterday. My audience is not 100% representative of the of the larger population. I never claim that it is. But I asked you guys yesterday on Twitter. I said, hey, what percentage of you are able, like believe that schools should be open. Basically, I'll read you the exact question that I put up and I was kind of blown away even with the popularity of my audience.

Even with people having a lot of opinions that sometimes overlap, I said, hey, should all public schools in this country be reopened for in person classroom instruction and 95% of you said yes.

That's by the way, the same opinion that the CDC has. That's the same thing that all the pediatricians out there are saying. So over, you know, 50,000 of you, I think, ended up voting in that poll and the massive numbers by huge numbers. You guys believe that that public school classrooms should be all open back up. But larger context with that is this question.

When all of those schools open back up. Do you actually believe as you kind of shake it down. Do you believe that people are going to return to sporting events in the same numbers or have we entered into an era where people have upset their overall normal lives.

And they are not going to go back to baseball and basketball games football games, even as well in the same numbers. And what I mean by that is if you've watched on television and looked at the overall ratings numbers, I don't think there's any doubt that when sports shut down in March, April, May, June, July.

A lot of people out there over that four month period found other ways to spend their time. Maybe you watch Netflix, maybe you watch Disney Plus, maybe you just started hiking, maybe you are working out more whatever your personal habits in your life might have become.

I wonder after an entire year, whether Major League baseball fans are going to come back in the same manner that we were used to beforehand or are people going to have gotten used to moving on to other things in their life and they're not going to go back to games in the same way in person.

It's a massive question because there's really not a lot of precedent for it. We've never had to my knowledge in our lives. Certainly any sport that is just basically said, hey, we're not going to have fans for an entire year.

And then they try to come back and flip the switch and return to normalcy and the NBA and hockey aren't great examples because their season got shut down near the end of it back in March of last year.

...