Play-in games? In MY Champions Wildcard?

Apparently, it's more likely than you think.

An exclusive report from The Jeopardy! Fan drops a bombshell: untelevised, no-prize-money “play-in games” will whittle down the number of one- and two-game champions from last season to fifty who will contest the Season 39 Champions Wildcard, alongside the four players who advance from the Season 39 Second Chance that begins this coming Tuesday.

Just like the whole “postseason” itself and the attendant reduction of regular play, getting rid of high-scoring non-winners advancing in tournaments, and airing two-game total-point finals over weekends, this would be another example of something I’ve had to drill into my own head about the current Jeopardy! regime: if you’re ever thinking “the show has never done that before” or “Michael Davies couldn’t possibly…,” get that out of your head. Davo won’t be inexorably beholden to any tradition, no matter how long-standing.

Before I move on to look at some outstanding questions from this, I want to throw something out there, apropos of nothing: releasing this information at this time, and granting its source anonymity, doesn't seem to me like something a "show's PR flack" would do.¹

The “untelevised” and “no prize money” aspects

Over and over again, Davies has insisted that he sees Jeopardy! as a sport. I’ve used those statements to criticize the manner in which the full fields of the Clubs and Hearts brackets of Fall 2023 Champions Wildcard were released to the public.²

Here’s my sports analogy on not televising these games, if they’re not otherwise made available: this is like some or all of the best-of-three Wild Card series of the Major League Baseball playoffs being played behind closed doors, not televised or streamed, and with the press barred from covering them.

That would be simply unacceptable, no? For any sports league, whether in North America or anywhere else in the world, to have a case where it’s saying to its viewing public, “we eliminated a handful of the lowest-ranking players, we played games to do it, but we won’t show you those games, you just have to trust us”… hopefully, it sounds as bananas to you as it does to me. ESPN, The Athletic, Deadspin, and every other sports media outlet would be screaming at the top of its lungs for transparency.

I can already imagine the precedent that Davo might seek to invoke: the qualifying rounds of UEFA competitions like its Champions League prior to the group stage.³ But it doesn’t work. Even the very earliest rounds have video coverage to at least some parts of the world, and those games are open to the press and public. To have the play-in games essentially be a black box? Not befitting of where you want to take the game, sir.

As far as the lack of prize money, I think that’s also inappropriate — and indeed, disrespectful to the players in those games. Even if the travel and accommodations for the event are covered by the show, as a recent TJ!F mailbag response indicated they are, that still doesn’t compensate those players for any loss of income they may suffer as a result. If the award to Champions Wildcard quarterfinalists remains at $5,000, as it was this fall, then these play-in game winners should award the standard regular play consolation prizes of $3,000 for second and $2,000 for third to their non-winners, just as will be the case in Second Chance. The show’s budget surely isn’t so tight that such prizes would be financially unfeasible.

How many games? How many players, and who?

There were thirty-nine one-game and eighteen two-game Jeopardy! champions in 2022–23. That means seven of them would have to be eliminated to make the field fit. Difficult to do when two lose each game, right?

Actually, a solution to that one is easy, and the Season 39 Second Chance field points to it. Rotimi Kukoyi and Sophia Weng, two of the three players in the two Season 35 Teen Tournaments who didn’t play in last season’s High School Reunion Tournament, will return at that stage. Both Kukoyi and Weng did not advance from the quarterfinals of their respective Teen Tournaments. That leaves one player from those two Season 35 events who also wasn’t in the HSRT — 2018 Teen finalist Emma Arnold. As she has a Jeopardy! victory under her belt⁴, Champions Wildcard would be the naturally appropriate stage at which to bring her back, much as 2022 National College Championship third runner-up Isaac Applebaum was in the Diamonds bracket in late October.

That raises you up to eight players to being eliminated before the Champions Wildcard “competition proper”; eight losers means four play-in games. The seemingly most natural method to determine their participants would be lowest-winning one-game champions; if you put Arnold in the main bracket directly, those twelve 1-time champs playing in would be:

• Devin Lohman ($1,200)

• Jesse Matheny ($2,600)

• Crystal Zhao ($4,199)

• Rachel Clark ($6,500)

• Johanna Stoberock ($6,999)

• Eric Anderson ($7,600)

• Ed Petersen ($7,999)

• James Tyler ($8,200)

• Anji Nyquist ($8,800)

• Ilena di Toro ($9,500)

• Nik Berry ($9,601)

• Holly Hassel ($10,500)

When do they get taped… um, played?

This past Monday on “Inside Jeopardy!,” Sarah Foss said “we are done with all of our tapings for 2023.” Of course, if these play-in games aren’t ever going to see the light of day, then they could theoretically go down before year’s end.

But that makes no sense to me. Much more likely is that they’ll be in the same windows as the Champions Wildcard competitions proper will be filmed; those are January 3-5 and January 17-19. It’s possible that the play-in games could happen on the Tuesdays immediately prior (the 2nd and 16th respectively).⁵

It’s also possible that they will be fit in as part of those three-day taping blocks. A slight difference in the ticketing schedule between the two Winter 2024 CWCs and the four Fall 2023 ones is that the second taping session on the second day commences at 2:00 pm (Pacific Time), vice 1:00. In the four fall sections, that second day saw the final four quarterfinals taped; two in the morning, two in the afternoon. So it’s possible that each of the upcoming brackets could have two play-in games played first, followed by three or four quarterfinals on the first day (Wednesday), the remaining quarterfinals on the second day, and the semifinals and two-game final on the third day. That would require either the Wednesday or Thursday taping days of each session to get through six shows, but that hasn’t been a problem for the show in the past.

In conclusion

Another piece of the postseason puzzle, and of the Season 40 calendar, comes into place.

I am left to wonder why we’re hearing about this news in this manner. After all, it seems like something that would be perfect to announce on “the exclusive and official podcast destination for all things Jeopardy!” Why wasn’t it? Your guess is as good as mine. Direct that inquiry to Mr. Davies, Mrs. Foss, and Ms. Shapiro Cooke.

1. Context: Comment on r/Jeopardy, December 6; editorial at The Jeopardy! Fan, December 9.

2. While the matchups in the week those sections began were made public on Monday, the whole roster of each was not unveiled until the afternoon of the first quarterfinal, after that game had aired in multiple media markets. The analogy I drew is if the NFL allowed its early Week 1 games to kick off with the scheduled only revealed through Week 4 (Clubs) or Week 6 (Hearts).

The NFL’s regular season is 18 weeks long. For Clubs, the first two quarterfinals (Thursday & Friday) were released early, thus one-ninth of the schedule; for Hearts, the first three QFs (Wed, Thurs, Fri), thus one-third.

3. UEFA = Union of European Football Associations. Its Champions League is the most prestigious club soccer competition in the world. Every country’s league champion and high-ranking runners-up in the top countries get entry into the next year’s edition. Of the 78 total clubs competing, 26 qualify directly into the group stage; the remaining 52, including champions of 42 countries, compete over a series of qualifying rounds in the summer for the remaining six group stage places.

4. Not two; Arnold won her semifinal after advancing from the quarterfinals by wildcard.

5. The Mondays of those two weeks are not feasible options, as they are both Federal holidays (New Year’s Day and Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, respectively).