ABC/John Fleenor

Kaitlyn Bristowe explains why Clayton Echard will be a good 'The Bachelor' star and why his season will be "great"

By Elizabeth Kwiatkowski, 12/24/2021

The Bachelorette co-host Kaitlyn Bristowe has explained why Clayton Echard will be a good Bachelor star for Season 26 and why his The Bachelor season next year will be great.

Clayton, a 28-year-old orthopedic sales representative and former college football player, will be starring on The Bachelor when it premieres Monday, January 3 at 8PM ET/PT on ABC.

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Based on a trailer ABC recently released for its 2022 The Bachelor season, there will be plenty of drama and tears as Clayton apparently fell in love with three women and slept with two bachelorettes!

"I can tell you this guy, Clayton, is one of the most sensitive, in tune with his emotions kind of person that I've ever met," Kaitlyn, 36, told Us Weekly during a recent episode of its "Here for the Right Reasons" podcast while promoting the upcoming Dancing with the Stars tour.

"And I think that will make for a good Bachelor," she added.

Although Kaitlyn co-hosted the last two seasons of The Bachelorette alongside Tayshia Adams, former The Bachelor star and NFL player Jesse Palmer will serve as the host of Clayton's season following Chris Harrison's permanent departure from the franchise earlier this year.

Kaitlyn, however, still got to know Clayton while he competed for Michelle Young's heart on The Bachelorette's eighteenth season, which airs its finale Tuesday night on ABC.

"It's gonna be extremely difficult for him because of how, you know, sensitive and emotional he is," Kaitlyn teased of Clayton's own journey to find love on the franchise.

"But that's such a great quality [that] you wanna see in a Bachelor. I think it's gonna be a really great season."

Clayton and Michelle formed a connection while filming The Bachelorette and her fifth-grade students selected him as the best choice amongst her suitors, but Michelle eliminated the buff bachelor when selecting her Final 4 suitors for hometown dates.

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Michelle said she felt something missing with Clayton, and following his ouster, he cried about how he wants to have a wife and children "more than anything" and would do whatever it takes to make that dream come true.

However, Clayton didn't receive a lot of screentime on Michelle's season prior to the episode that featured his surprising elimination.

"I kept thinking, like, if you're gonna make him the Bachelor, you gotta show more of him and why he's gonna be our next Bachelor," Kaitlyn told Us.

"Because, I mean, if we're watching Michelle's season, we're rooting for [Rodney Matthews] to be... the Bachelor -- someone that we're like, 'Whoa, we fell in love with that person and we're rooting for them to find love.'"

ABC had selected Clayton to star on the next The Bachelor season even before Michelle's The Bachelorette edition began airing in October, but Clayton's participation wasn't confirmed until late November.

"With Clayton, we're kinda like, 'What? Oh, okay.' And now we're rooting for him, but we don't know much about him," Kaitlyn admitted.

ABC announced the identities of the 31 bachelorettes who will meet and date Clayton on The Bachelor last week.

Clayton's cast of women range in age from 23 to 32 years old and include a pediatric nurse, a bar mitzvah dancer, an architectural historian and a former Olympian.

And Clayton confirmed on Good Morning America last month that he "did find love" on the show.

"I was a little skeptical going into the whole journey, but I'm so pleasantly surprised that things worked out much different than what I had thought," Clayton shared at the time.

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Clayton said he went into The Bachelor with "a checklist of sorts" in that he wanted to find a partner who is "funny, intelligent, driven, [and] put forth effort."

"What I found is very quickly the women blew my expectations out of the water. They brought all of that and so much more," Clayton teased on GMA, adding, "I realized that, ultimately, I was going to find everything that I wanted and so much more."

Clayton certainly did apparently find everything he was looking for -- in more than one woman.

During The Bachelorette: The Men Tell All episode for Season 18, a special sneak peek of Clayton's upcoming The Bachelor season aired and featured Clayton dropping two bombshells on viewers.

"I didn't believe it could happen, but I am in love with three women," Clayton admits.

Footage then seemed to flash to Clayton standing in front of two ladies, who appeared to be either his Final 2 bachelorettes or two of his Final 3 women, after his round of overnight Fantasy Suite dates.

"I just want you to know that what I'm about to say is not going to be easy to hear. I want to be fully, fully transparent, and I know it's not easy to hear, but I was intimate with both of you," Clayton confesses to the two ladies.

The drama apparently leaves Clayton feeling "so broken" as he stares at a diamond engagement ring, seemingly unsure of whom to give it to.

Kaitlyn suggested she can relate to Clayton since she had made headlines for sleeping with her eventual The Bachelorette 11 runner-up, Nick Viall, before her round of overnight Fantasy Suite dates during her 2015 season.

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"I'm gonna have to give him my number and say, 'If you need to chat through anything, call me,'" Kaitlyn noted with a laugh.

She acknowledged, however, Bachelor Nation has "come a long way" since her controversial season.

"I know I received, like, so much shaming around having sex and, you know, it was so controversial at the time. And then fast forward to Hannah Brown's season, we were celebrating her having sex four times," Kaitlyn said.

"So I love that the show has evolved and that the viewers have evolved with the show and have come to understand that that does happen and that that's okay. And that it's our decision of what we wanna do."

Kaitlyn also pointed out how Clayton's sex admission wasn't exactly a groundbreaking moment for The Bachelor franchise.

"[It's] not the first time somebody's been intimate with more than one person," Kaitlyn noted.

"It's also not the first time that we've heard them say it out loud to somebody, you know, obviously I did that as well. It's a tricky situation because to some people, like Clayton, that is part of making a life-altering decision -- being intimate with somebody."

Kaitlyn added how genuinely falling in love with more than one person also "happens" on the show. (Kaitlyn previously revealed, for example, Michelle was definitely in love with both of her Final 2 suitors, Nayte Olukoya and Brandon Jones, on her The Bachelorette season).

"It's a really tough thing to navigate because you wouldn't do it in the outside world and now you're having to, you know, make sense of it in The Bachelor world," Kaitlyn shared on the podcast.

"I hope people give him some grace and I hope he gives himself some grace because he's a human being and he is not perfect."