Joel Klatt has a vision for college football, and it involves the Rose Bowl becoming what the Super Bowl is to the NFL or what the Final Four is to college basketball.
Fox Sports’ lead college football analyst and 2025 Awfulies recipient made his pitch on The Next Round podcast, arguing that college football needs a permanent home for its national championship game and that home should be in Pasadena every Jan. 1.
“You know what we also don’t have in college football? A tentpole event,” Klatt said. “We don’t have one. We don’t have the Final Four, or the Super Bowl, or the Stanley Cup, or the [NBA] Finals, or anything like that. We call it the ‘national championship.’ Guess what? Women’s platform diving is competing for a national championship. Everyone’s competing for the national championship. The Rose Bowl is what we should be competing for. That is a tentpole event. The Rose Bowl. The run to the roses. Everybody should be trying to get to the Rose Bowl.”
This isn’t exactly a new crusade for Joel Klatt. Still, it resonates even more so now as college football continues to expand its playoff, diluting what makes bowl games special and cramming championship games further into January, where they compete with the NFL playoffs for attention.
The Rose Bowl currently rotates in and out of the College Football Playoff as either a quarterfinal, semifinal, or standalone New Year’s Six bowl. This year, it’s hosting a quarterfinal game between Alabama and Indiana on Jan. 1, but Klatt wants more than that. He wants the Rose Bowl to be the destination every single year, the way Omaha is for the College World Series or Augusta is for The Masters.
“January 1st, start with the sun out, end in the second half with the lights, sun going down over the San Gabriel Mountains,” Klatt continued. “That’s where we should end college football every year. We don’t bleed into the NFL playoffs. We play the playoff. We’re done by January 1st at the Rose Bowl. It is the most iconic, best sporting venue in all of sports, and college football can own it. And we don’t do so.”
There’s something appealing about Klatt’s vision beyond just nostalgia. The Rose Bowl has hosted games since 1923 and has been the centerpiece of New Year’s Day football for over a century. The Granddaddy of Them All carries more weight than any rotating championship venue ever will. But college football has never been good at committing to one place or one date when it can spread the wealth across multiple cities instead, and there’s no reason to think that’s changing.
About Sam Neumann
Since the beginning of 2023, Sam has been a staff writer for Awful Announcing and The Comeback. A 2021 graduate of Temple University, Sam is a Charlotte native, who currently calls Greenville, South Carolina his home. He also has a love/hate relationship with the New York Mets and Jets.