College Football Guy Joel Klatt Saying March Madness Sucks And No One Wants to Watch Cinderellas Might Be Top 5 Bad Take Of 2025

I need Joel Klatt to say this to Gus Johnson on January 2.

The two are Fox's top college football booth and are scheduled to call the Holiday Bowl together after calling the Big Noon Kickoff games on Fox all football season. They're a great duo on TV, and I'll be watching. But I need Klatt to tell Gus how he feels about March Madness when they get back together in the New Year. 

"The NCAA Basketball Tournament is a joke," Klatt said on The Next Round. "It's the dumbest tournament and the least fair tournament in all of sports. We put teams at odds times in neutral sites on a one-game affair. Like, that doesn't crown a true champion. We're not doing anything that tells us who's the best team over the entire season...it sucks for the fans." 

I mean, I could keep going all night here. This is just Gus on these calls. If I widened the search, this would be the longest blog of the year on the Barstool Blog.  

Just a horrendous take from Klatt here. The beauty of the NCAA Tournament is that you have to put together six complete games to be crowned champion. And the format allows teams like Vermont, VCU, George Mason, Loyola, Butler, Davidson, Florida Gulf Coast, and SO MANY OTHERS...to have their day. Now, it's a little different in this new NIL era, but you get my point. Even if you're UConn or Duke, you'd better show up ready to play, or you go home. Oh, you were a top seed? Too bad. 

Klatt proposed that the NCAA adopt the old World Cup format, where you play in a "Group Stage" and the winner of each group advances. Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz. No thanks. I love seeing a 2-seed fighting for their lives against some random 15-seed that most people have never heard of on a Thursday afternoon. 

Klatt got to this take after basically shitting on the current CFB Playoff format, saying that no one wants to watch underdogs in the tournament.

"We’re not looking for a Cinderella. Nobody cares in football about James Madison, or the equivalent of George Mason going to the Final Four. Nobody cares in football about that. We don’t want Cinderellas. We want the best teams playing each other at the end.” 👀👀

Um, I do. 

I'm a college football casual, Joel. I'll be rooting like crazy for JMU and Tulane this weekend; I think a lot of people will be. I'm not looking for the biggest school with the fattest NIL budgets to meet in the finals every season. Like, what fun is that? Klatt just wants the favorites to meet every year. All four #1 seeds in the Final Four. #1 vs #2 in the College Football Final. That shit sounds pretty dull to me. 

But getting back to his take on March Madness. "It sucks for the fans." I hear a lot more fans complaining about this CFB Playoff than I do about March Madness. Maybe he's jealous of basketball buzz? He's anti-underdog, that's for sure. Wild. 

No one has had a better seat to watch some underdog heroics in the NCAA Tournament than his partner, Gus Johnson. He'd better give Gus a chance to volley back at this brutal take when they work together again in January.