Joel Klatt makes his case to be ‘the next Kirk Herbstreit,’ or perhaps something even bigger

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Who is the definitive voice of college football?

For years, it’s been Kirk Herbstreit. The ESPN college football analyst and College GameDay mainstay likes to play humble, but his Saturday monologuescan remake programsand get coaches fired. But as he’s settled into elder statehood, Herbie has shifted gears somewhat, spreading his focus to the NFL and becoming the country’s foremost golden retriever owner.

That’s created an opening, one that several people are attempting to fill. One of whom is Fox Sports’ Joel Klatt.

“I thought to myself, ‘I want to be the next Kirk Herbstreit,’” Klatt told Andrew Marchand in a profile for The Athletic. As Marchand posits, it’s possible that the former Colorado quarterback has surpassed him.

Almost imperceptibly, Klatt has spent the last decade inching his way up the college football media pecking order and making himself an essential voice in the many ongoing debates that surround the sport.

In the late 2000s, Klatt was calling high school games on an RSN. By 2011, Fox Sports hired him to call college football while he hosted sports radio shows. In 2013, he joined the fledgling FS1 network, and by 2015 he was the network’s lead analyst, working alongside Gus Johnson.

“Anytime any executive asked me what my ultimate goal was or dream was, I would always tell them, ‘What I’m doing now is great, but what I’d really love is to be a network’s lead college football game analyst,’” Klatt told The Athletic.

Along the way, he launched The Joel Klatt Show: A College Football Podcast and made it a staple of Fox Sports programming. And perhaps the surest sign of his ascension yet is that he quite literally replaced Herbstreit as the commentator in EA Sports College Football 27.

It also didn’t hurt that, at a time when ESPN was mired in perceptions that it was wagging the dog, with people like Herbstreit using their relevance to move public opinion in the direction that made them the most money, Klatt used his pulpit to provide what felt, in theory, like an outsider view (even if he was working for the other big fish in the pond).

Klatt’s earned plenty of criticsof his own, and his perceived Big Ten bias, especially given Fox’s media deal ties, does make him feel like their version of Herbstreit. But it’s been an impressive climb to the top of the college football pundit mountain.

Now comes the hard part, as people like Josh Pate, Pat McAfee, and Dave Portnoy are coming for that crown as well. That was a topic of discussion on a recent episode of The Play-By-Play podcast, where both Brendan Kleen and Drew Lerner thought Pate had already surpassed both Herbstreit and Klatt.

That’s the problem with coming for the crown. You’re never the only one, and there’s always someone else coming up right behind you.

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