Joel Klatt has called football on Fox for a decade, and he still finds the UFL the most challenging part of his job — in a good way.
In a recent interview with Gio Journal, Klatt was asked how his role changes between a Big Noon Saturday college game and a UFL broadcast. On a college broadcast, Klatt is doing most of the heavy lifting himself. He studies rosters and coaching philosophies beforehand, watches film all week, and then filters the game through his own preparation in real time.
In the UFL, Fox can hear coaches communicate, hear quarterbacks calling plays live on the air, and get cameras and microphones directly into the action in ways that college and NFL broadcasts simply don’t allow. That means the game narrates itself, and Klatt’s job shifts from decoding the action to making sure viewers understand what they are already hearing — which, as he told Gio Journal — turns out to be its own challenge.
“I view my role much more as just a translator,” Klatt said, “as if you went to an awesome place internationally and you didn’t really know what was going on and hearing all these terms, but you knew it was a really cool place to be. Well wouldn’t it be great if you could have someone that could help you translate what’s going on in that awesome restaurant internationally? That’s kind of my role for a UFL game. And to be honest, it’s challenging, and that’s the most fun part about it.”
Klatt and Curt Menefee have been Fox’s top spring football booth since the XFL days, going back to 2020, and Klatt has talked before about how it took him time to understand that the role required a different approach than his fall work.
“If I would have known that earlier,” he said in the Gio Journal interview, “I certainly would have been better off.”
The UFL’s 2026 season kicks off with what Klatt described as the most excitement he has felt heading into any season of spring football he has covered, citing new cities, new venues, and a raft of new rules. The one he singled out as the league’s best innovation is the fourth-down conversion option as an alternative to the onside kick.
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.