Cue up some Lizzo
Because it's "About Damn Time" — for the Tournament of Champions
We now have our twenty-seven combatants in trivia, assembled and arrayed on the battlefield. And like the Breen homeworld or the North of Westeros, a cold and unforgiving place it is. After almost twenty-four weeks of buildup, and nearly four months delayed, the Tournament of Champions finally gets underway.
Praise the Fates, Merv, and Alex, and pass the ammunition — let’s go to war!
Today’s first segment, not actually sponsored by CSC
In the pregame media notes to sports contests, especially at the collegiate level1, some really deep cut trivia gets assembled. So here, in that vein, are some facts and figures about this event.
This is the 31st Tournament of Champions in the syndicated era. That makes it the second most played2 tournament in the show’s history, trailing only the Teen Tournament (32 editions).
It’s also the oldest of the show’s traditions, having been first played in 19853; the Teen Tournament was inaugurated in 1987, the College Championship in 1989, and the Teachers Tournament in 2011.
It has the most players ever in a ToC, at 27; six more than the last edition, and 12 more (that is, 80% bigger) than the traditional field of 15.
It has the most “automatic” qualifiers ever, with eight — 2022-23 Celebrity Jeopardy! winner Ike Barinholtz, High School Reunion Tournament winner Justin Bolsen from Season 39, and six Champions Wildcard winners from this season. (No previous ToC had more than four.)
It has the most three-game champions ever — eight qualifying directly from regular play, and an additional three through the Season 37/38 Champions Wildcard events. (The previous high on that count was five, in 2006.)
Kevin Belle’s $42,798 make him the lowest-earning three-game champion to directly qualify for the ToC. (The lowest-earning ToC qualifier from regular play overall, without regard to games won, is Gary Palmer, 1986; 4 wins, $18,400 on the original dollar values.)
The twenty-six non-celebrities earned, in the aggregate, $4,052,037. That is the third-highest total ever. As you might expect, with its big winners, the 2022 event clocks in on top at $5,750,089. But even with just 15, the 2019 ToC also surpasses this one at $4,066,343. (Of course, there, just over three-fifths of the winnings are accounted for by James Holzhauer.)
Gender breakdown for this field: twenty-two men, four women, one non-binary. That’s the highest fraction of men since 2017 (13/15), and the tenth-highest among all 31 fields.
What’s done is done. Let’s enjoy the ride from here.
Just like the song about Patch Adams and the NX-01 — it’s been a long road, getting from there to here. But there’s light at the end of the tunnel. And as it comes into view, storylines abound.
Will “rust” be a factor — that is, could more recent experience help out the six Champions Wildcard winners? Can Cris Pannullo back up his 21-game run by becoming the third No. 1 seed in the last four ToCs to win it? Will Ben Chan rebound from the oh-so-close miss that took him out? Who wins the Battle of the Beltway on Leap Day — or does our nation’s capital get wiped out by an airstrike from the north? In that vein, can Juveria Zaheer keep the glass slipper on, and write a storybook ending to her Jeopardy! fairy tale? Will a sort of “Silky Johnson energy” power Yogesh Raut deep into the tournament? Will Ike Barinholtz acquit himself well enough to keep egg off Davo’s face? And last but not least… Matthew Marcus, what inspired the change of look?
These, and so many more, await us over the next fifteen to nineteen games.
Updates to my stuff
I wrote (well, mostly copied and pasted) a lot of HTML code getting some of my pages ready for this showcase event, and adding its results to my compilation of the show’s history, facts and figures.
ToC leaderboard. With the field becoming finalized, the writing in the second paragraph changes. Since it’s no longer updated on a rolling basis, “Current through…” gives way to “Included are all…” I did elect to add in the previous winnings of the HSR and CW winners; this was to make the players’ totals (save Ike’s) add up to the number given above. I also added the legend for performance in this event. This gets updated with each new result, so that two by two, we’ll turn these off-white rows to reddish shades over the next two and a half weeks, until the last three — and after three to seven more games, add in gold, silver, and bronze.
Regular play vs. the ToC. Had to add two new rows in the regular play section and two new sections for Champions Wildcard and Celebrity. This is a compilation of how the position where players end up on the regular play leaderboard, as well as what types of special events they come out of, does in the ToC. Like the leaderboard, this gets updated after each game with the eliminated players’ results. And it sees, for the first time since Power Players Week in 2016, the return of hot pink (or magenta, if you like) to denote Celebrity play.
Consolidated ToC data. We’ve got another row on the main page, of course, but this also got an update of the inflation-adjusted ToC winnings totals. The second, smaller table at the bottom will not get updated until the end of the ToC, mainly because little value is gained by constant updates of the weighted averages. This page, and the previous one, also received some significant updates to their notes.
Something I’m also debating regarding both those pages — in what category to place the HSRT. It certainly wasn’t a Teen Tournament; all but one of the contestants had completed high school when it taped. It wasn’t quite a College Championship; a few had already graduated, and they wore standard Jeopardy! attire, not sweaters in university colors. It’s probably a one-off event — but I am disinclined to create a separate column for it. However, I do have one for Second Chance, and that probably is going to be a one-off, insofar as its winners qualifying directly into the ToC. Right now I’m putting it in with the College Championships, but that may change before the end of the event.
Payout history. Added in Champions Wildcard, and did some re-wording, mainly to reflect that payouts in tournament finals are now fixed (as opposed to minimums).
A parting thought
Whether you’re cold to the Davies format like Luke Winkie4, lukewarm about it like me, or white-hot like Andy Saunders, we’re about to see an epic battle unfold on the Alex Trebek Stage. To sign off, I’ll go back to the well of Ms. Jefferson — I expect this Tournament of Champions to be “Good as Hell.”
CSC = College Sports Communicators, rebranded in 2022 from its longtime acronym, CoSIDA (College Sports Information Directors of America). (Footnote here because one can’t be placed in a heading.)
Tied for second most, if you add the 2022 Jeopardy! National College Championship to the 30 syndicated College Championships held to date.
And really, even older than that; eleven Tournaments of Champions were played on the original Fleming version of the show. Robert K S has compiled some info on those over at JBoard.
Luke, it’s not the “fifth consecutive month of tournament play” (emphasis in original). Actually, it’s the sixth.