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MADISON, Wis. — It’s an idyllic Friday evening in Madison, and Gus Johnson is introducing Joel Klatt like he’s the reigning, defending undisputed champion.
Fox’s top college football broadcast booth — comprised of Johnson, Klatt and sideline reporter Jenny Taft — is at its production meeting ahead of Wisconsin’s showdown with Alabama.
The weekly meeting is akin to the walkthrough that football teams go through to prepare for their game.
The announcing booth and the overall production, led by Fox lifer Chuck McDonald, who for years worked on the network’s top NFL crews with John Madden and Pat Summerall and later Joe Buck and Troy Aikman, has risen to the upper tier of big-time broadcast crews.
The production meeting illustrated why the booth is so upbeat and prepared come kickoff.
Johnson, in his bombastic broadcasting voice, declares that Klatt is the “captain” of this meeting.
The roles are reversed from what we see on TV — whereas Johnson is the quarterback of the broadcast and leads the rhythm with play-by-play, Klatt is guiding the meeting like a professor giving a lecture to a small class.
He has a laminated sheet of notes on about 75 players but barely glances at it to go in-depth, unit by unit, of starters and reserves who are likely to see playing time, one by one, stating their histories, strengths, weaknesses and future professional prospects.
Klatt has spoken to key players not just about their football but about their hobbies, noting at one point that Wisconsin quarterback Tyler Van Dyke was an avid golfer.
The two had plans to play golf for money — “and he has it,” Klatt said.
Throughout the meeting, Johnson would ask Klatt follow-up questions about everything from Xs and Os to narrative elements.
Here, he wondered, as the rest of us do, about the general market in NIL — how much are these guys actually getting paid?
Klatt said that a “run of the mill” quarterback is earning “mid six figures” while it can reach seven figures for an “impact guy.”
The structure is likely to change again soon, he noted, as revenue sharing begins and programs are going to have to decide how to divvy up a proverbial salary cap.
NIL will still be allowed, but the organized collectives might get legislated out.
(Lamentably, the golf match will have to wait, as Van Dyke suffered a torn ACL in the first quarter on Saturday, and the future of the Badgers’ offense the rest of the season has a bleak forecast).
Taft, who at one time was the moderator between Skip Bayless and Shannon Sharpe on FS1’s “Undisputed,” approaches the sideline reporting role with rigor, and she has brought several elements to the meeting she hopes to include in the broadcast if there’s time.
She spoke with Alabama quarterback Jalen Milroe, who told her matter-of-factly, “I’ve never been to Wisconsin. I want to get in, get the win and get the hell out.”
Alabama wideout Ryan Williams, a 17-year-old phenom, comes up time and again in the production meeting, and Taft reports that all of his teammates have relayed that he has been relentless in the weight room because he feels a duty to live up to the hype.
“I always try to anticipate which players will step up,” Taft said.
“But then there’s an emotional story, which might not fit, but I want to have it if it works. Sometimes the conversations never make air, but sometimes we’ll have those teams again, so it’s creating those relationships.”
Johnson and Klatt began working together on the top Fox college football team in 2015, and Taft joined the crew in 2017.
In 2019, Fox introduced the “Big Noon Kickoff” strategy, putting the best game of their package at noon ET, a time slot which had previously been reserved for the dregs of all the networks, and bolstering it with a pregame show that currently features Rob Stone, Matt Leinart, Urban Meyer, Brady Quinn and Mark Ingram.
For the last three years, the Michigan-Ohio State game in the “Big Noon” slot has been the most-watched regular season college football game each year on any network.
Beyond the individual talents of Johnson and Klatt, the secret sauce to the booth is that they are genuinely rooting for each other.
“They play off each other really well,” McDonald, the producer, said.
“But the other part about it is they like spending time together — at lunch, in the car, in coach’s meetings. The chemistry of that element — people probably think everybody’s putting on a show, but this is exactly what it’s like at all times.”
As a viewer, it is remarkable how quickly Klatt can process what just happened in a football game with 22 moving parts on the field.
“Nobody I’ve ever been with sees the game as quickly and can break it down like Joel,” McDonald said, noting that Klatt uses a different telestrator in real-time than anybody else.
“When you look at his telestration, he is doing stuff that a lot of people would do after a commercial, but before the extra point is kicked. That’s a real tell on how well he sees the game. A lot of other guys have monitors that are on five-second delays [and ask the producer], ‘Was that 99 off the end?’ I have never had to confirm that for Joel in the 10 years we’ve worked together. He sees it now.”
An example of this was last year when Michigan running back Donovan Edwards bursted for a 22-yard touchdown against Penn State, and Klatt immediately broke down the offense and defense with different colors on the telestrator.
When other analysts break out the telestrator after a commercial break, it is often something that was put together for them in the production truck, according to McDonald.
McDonald said that, besides Klatt, the only color commentator that could always make him “right” in choosing from the production truck which camera angle, replay or graphic to display on the screen was Madden.
Johnson also gushed about Klatt, saying he should be looked at as a football savant in accordance with great young offensive minds in coaching, like Ryan Day, Lincoln Riley, Sean McVay and, when they were young, Joe Gibbs and Norv Turner.
“He’s a coach. He’s a young innovative mind that can decipher and present football at any level because he’s an incredible broadcaster,” Johnson said.
Johnson built up to the punchline: “Why’s he an incredible broadcaster? Because I taught him!”
Johnson left CBS for Fox in 2011 with an aura of getting up for big moments, in what Bill Simmons used to call the “Law of Gus Johnson” — where it felt like every game he called would come down to the final seconds and he’d have the perfect tone to match the moment.
McDonald credited him, counterintuitively, for staying grounded unless moments actually call for him to reach another level.
“He has more restraint than people think he does. He saves those big calls for big moments,” McDonald said.
In a group conversation with The Post, Johnson, Klatt and Taft were all more interested in talking about what the other two do well than about promoting themselves.
“We’re a team,” Johnson said. “We delight in the excellence of others. We delight in the excellence of the young men and women that we cover on the field and we delight in the excellence of the team. There is an unselfishness here that is unparalleled in my experience as a broadcaster.”
“There’s such a trust,” Taft said. “We’re not a team that’s going to throw each other under the bus.”
Klatt credited Johnson with establishing a “rhythm” that he believes viewers only notice subconsciously.
“He explained to me that it’s kind of like a double-dutch — don’t trip the rope,” Klatt said.
Klatt believed right away that it was a good crew but was affirmed in his belief during the Michigan-Ohio State game in 2021, when the Wolverines finally got over the hump to defeat the rival Buckeyes.
“I knew that we had a really good sound, but you don’t really know until you do something where the stage requires you to be great,” Klatt said.
“That game was when I was like, OK, what I know to be a really good crew just did an amazing job in a game that had to happen. It’s like great players have to be great when greatness is needed. That was the moment where I thought that we could get to that level when it was needed.”
Johnson pointed out that all three of them were Division-1 athletes — he played baseball at Howard, Klatt was quarterback at Colorado and Taft played lacrosse at Boston University.
Sports fans crave broadcasters who share their passion for the game, and communicate as though they are living out their dream jobs.
Asked about bringing that energy to every game, Johnson gave a thoughtful answer.
“My father was a janitor and a security guard, who died a double-amputee from Diabetes, who never went past the third grade in education. My job during the college football season is to watch marching bands, cheerleaders, mascots with young men from 18-25 who are trying their best to gain an education as well as maybe pursue some of their dreams — stardom in college or perhaps professional football,” he said.
“I firmly feel that I have to walk in the light. I don’t want to walk in any kind of darkness. This a blessing. Words can’t express the amount of gratitude that I have just to be in this business and sustain a career for over 30 years. I have no excuse but to be happy. People who watch these games, this is their leisure time. This is not ’60 Minutes.’”
