Joel Klatt unleashed one of the hottest takes of the year when he criticized the NCAA Tournament and now he’s admitting his mistake… at least somewhat.

Klatt launched the astonishing assault against one of the most popular events in all of American society on The Next Round podcast, saying that the tournament was a “joke” because of its one-and-done nature and that the best teams don’t always win.

On his own podcast, The Joel Klatt Show, the lead Fox college football analyst offered a mea culpa of sorts, saying that it was a “bad” and “terrible” take. But he stood by his opinion that he was still not a fan of Cinderella.

“It was a bad take. It was a terrible take.”@joelklatt revisits one of the “worst takes of the year” on the structure of March Madness. Thoughts? pic.twitter.com/FzwDTsiBVA

— The Joel Klatt Show: A College Football on FOX Pod (@JoelKlattShow) December 18, 2025

“It was a bad take. It was a terrible take,” Klatt admitted. “To be fair, what I said on their show Monday morning early was sloppy and worded wrong. So it was kind of like I landed the plane, but it was in a cornfield so we had to hit the eject and the plane didn’t crash necessarily. The NCAA basketball tournament, if the objective was to crown the best basketball team of the college basketball season, then it’s a bad format. And because of that, then it’s not fair is what I said. And I said, ‘It’s a joke, it’s the dumbest,’ and that’s obviously going to grab headlines. That’s stupid of me to use those terms.”

Klatt then tried again to clarify his bombastic take, saying that he did in fact love March Madness. However, he does not think the 68-team field is the best idea for crowning the best team of the college basketball season.

“The point is the best college basketball team for the year doesn’t always win the NCAA basketball tournament,” Klatt added. “That tournament is set up to crown its own champion. It’s a made for TV entertainment event. And it’s great. And by the way, I do love the NCAA basketball tournament. But if you’re asking me, ‘is it structured properly to crown the best team of the season?’ Then the answer is no. It’s a hot take. It’s a bad take. Not everyone is going to share that with me because everyone loves the entertainment value of Cinderellas in the NCAA basketball tournament.”

Joel Klatt continuing down this road is curious for one reason, what would actually be a better way than a tournament that the NCAA has operated since 1939? He originally proposed some kind of World Cup group stage format. But maybe we should just go back to the 1970s where only conference champions are allowed to participate. Good luck with convincing the NCAA or its television partners to go in that direction.

But take it further and you can make the argument that any postseason structure isn’t a fair way to decide a champion. The only real way to do it is like they do in the English Premier League – have every team play each other home and away and the team with the most points at the end of the season wins a trophy. That’s easy to do with 20 teams. It’s much harder to do with over 350 teams competing for the same trophy.

Any team in any other sport has to win a tournament of some kind to win a trophy. It’s true in NCAA Football, the NFL, NHL, NBA, and almost everywhere else in sports. And ultimately, the fairest thing of all about the NCAA Tournament and others like it is that it’s decided in actual games that matter. Not by the narratives and eye tests that so dominate the college football discourse.

But Joel Klatt couldn’t also resist getting into another controversial topic, college football’s loathing of Cinderella stories. He made the case once again that nobody wants to really see a Cinderella story beyond a certain point.

“But here’s the thing, if you’re actually honest with yourself, you love the Cinderellas early, but late, you want to see the best teams playing against each other. You want to see incredible regional finals. You want to see Kentucky and Duke with Laettner hitting it at the buzzer. Why? Because that’s greatness. Yes, you love Cinderellas because you have 68 teams. But in college football, ours is much more selective. We have 12 teams of 130 whatever teams in college football. And so once we’re down to 12, now we don’t really want Cinderellas. And I will maintain that opinion,” he concluded.

It’s this exclusionary tone from college football that continues to drive fans up a wall. If a school like Butler or George Mason earns their way to the Final Four, why wouldn’t you want to see them try to finish one of the great stories in sports? The ironic thing is that Joel Klatt was the one pounding the table for Indiana to get some respect last season as a Cinderella story and outsider.

By this logic, we should just scrap the College Football Playoff entirely, right? The only “fair” way to do it would be to do what we did before 1998 and let the teams play all their bowl games and then vote on who everyone thinks the best team is in college football. That way we can avoid all these pesky things like actually earning a championship on the field.