Why can’t ‘Jeopardy!’ contestants solve sports clues?

https://www.thestar.com/sports/2020/11/20/why-cant-jeopardy-contestants-solve-sports-clues.html

In the weeks leading up to the taping of his “Jeopardy!” appearance, Justin Earnshaw focused his show prep on science and math topics.

Sports? Not so much.

He followed the Red Sox, Bruins and Celtics closely because of family roots in Boston, and was confident enough in his knowledge of most of the major North American sports. His only real blind spot was football.

So of course when it came time for Canadian host Alex Trebek to introduce the categories, the lone sports topic on that 2018 episode of the long-running show was “Talkin’ Football.”

It didn’t go well. He fumbled on all of them. And that’s where his viral clip was born.

“My mom, who was in the audience for the taping, is obsessed with American football,” Earnshaw says, laughing. “As soon as I stepped off the stage, she gave me a little bit of hell in the most loving way.”

In the video, Earnshaw and his opponents remained silent, refusing to buzz in for any of the five football questions, causing long-time “Jeopardy!” host Trebek, a huge sports fan himself, to grow increasingly exasperated.

Earlier this month, Trebek died at the age of 80 after a long battle with pancreatic cancer. An outpouring of tributes from around the world followed, remembering the Sudbury, Ont. native as the heart and soul of a trivia show and a staple in living rooms for 36 “Jeopardy!” seasons.

Of the many clips from the show that circulated on social media following news of his death, many of them highlighted his love of sports. There was a sit-down interview where Trebek named his favourite Los Angeles Lakers players. And a surprise appearance from the host — a University of Ottawa graduate — during the NHL draft in October to help announce the first-round selection of Tim Stuetzle by the Ottawa Senators.

There was also another kind of sports-related Trebek tribute making its way around the web, where “Jeopardy!” contestants, like Earnshaw, fell on their faces while trying to answer sports questions on the show. In one instance, a contestant answered the clue “100-plus assists in an NHL season has been accomplished only 13 times, 11 times by this player,” with Magic Johnson instead of Wayne Gretzky. The list of sports category failures is so long, Claire McNear devoted an entire section to this phenomenon in her new book “Answers in the Form of Questions: A Definitive History and Insider’s Guide to Jeopardy!”

But the stories behind these blunders aren’t as simple as the idea that contestants are just nerds who don’t watch sports.

For Earnshaw, it was a matter of luck and strategy. He admits he knew some of the football answers, like what a fair catch was and the fact Tom Landry was the head coach of the Dallas Cowboys, but it was a strategic decision to not buzz in.

A few stumbles in the game had Earnshaw in the red, and he had just climbed out of the hole, sitting in third place with $2,600. Once he saw that neither of the other two contestants were buzzing into the football category, the last on the board in the first round, he was happy to roll his score over to the Double Jeopardy round.

“If it was a different point of the game,” Earnshaw says, “I would have risked it.”

Even buzzing in to answer a question can present its own set of challenges. Robin Miner-Swartz, an editor and consultant from Lansing, Mich. who had a three-episode run in 2019, spent the weeks leading up to the show playing “Jeopardy!” at home with a custom-made buzzer. But it turned out nothing could prepare her for the actual show, where if a contestant attempts to buzz in early they’re locked out for a quarter of a second.

“You have to know where to look on the board,” she says. “You have to listen to Alex’s voice and time your buzzing in. For video clues, you have to see the lights on the side to know when to buzz in. There is so much else happening and I didn’t know those things until I got there.”

And when she got there, the infamous “Jeopardy!” brain freeze happened. In her first game, Miner-Swartz buzzed in for $200 in a category titled “Chairman of the Boards.” The clue read: Detroit’s Andre Drummond has led the NBA six times in these rebounds that come off his own team’s miss.

This was an easy question for Miner-Swartz, who grew up in a sports household. Her father played on the Michigan State basketball team. Her mother was a huge Brooklyn Dodgers fan. When she worked at the Lansing State Journal covering entertainment and lifestyle, Miner-Swartz absorbed plenty of random factoids sitting next to the sports department in the newsroom.

But in the split-second she had to buzz in and answer, her mind wandered toward general sports lingo instead of basketball-specific terms. She incorrectly answered “second chance” instead of “offensive rebounds.”