Since the death of Jeopardy! host Alex Trebek, the game show has filled his slot with a series of guest hosts to varying results. This week, Super Bowl MVP Aaron Rodgers took to the set for his two-week guest stint. Rodgers treated his guest host job like a football game. He revealed the fun way he prepared for his guest-hosting stint on Jeopardy!
Even before his guest stint on the iconic game show, Aaron Rodgers had been a Jeopardy! devotee since childhood. While football is all about preparation before game day, you wouldn’t necessarily expect the NFL MVP to carry that mentality to hosting a game show. But you would be wrong. Speaking to The Ringer, Rodgers said about his preparation for the trivia show:
I would watch the show on mute. That was a good way to practice. So, you watch the show on mute, and you practice reading the clues and then calling on the contestants. That was a fun way of doing it, because it’s different from when you’re sitting on the couch playing to when you’re controlling everything. You’ve got to learn the form. It’s looking down to read the clue and then looking up to call on a contestant, and also understanding what the answer is in case none of the contestants get it right, and then realizing at that point that you’ve got to work on your posture and where you’re looking and know who you’re talking to when you give that response. There were so many little things that were important for Alex being so smooth that I just wanted to be sure I had down.
Aaron Rodgers' preparation for Jeopardy! isn’t surprising given his years as a top football player. All those years of studying films and going over playbooks prepared the NFL star for this moment. Given his attachment to the iconic game show, Rodgers wanted to do his best to please his family and himself. The Super Bowl champ poured his all into making sure everything would be right.
Aaron Rodgers asked executive producer Mike Richards about every possible Jeopardy! scenario. Again, his football mentality entered the playing field of the game show. The NFL star admitted:
I wanted to be really ready. In my preparation, there were a few things that came up that I just wanted to make sure I had down. It’s taped, so there’s opportunity for pickups and redoing things, but I’m a perfectionist and I didn’t want to have a lot of those. I wanted to be really, really locked in. I made sure [to ask] any questions I had about specific scenarios that came up in certain games because I wanted to be as ready as I possibly could be.
While Aaron Rodgers’ preparation paid off, for the most part, this mentality didn’t prepare him for being trolled on Jeopardy! Two-time champ Scott Shewfelt decided to tease Rodgers by writing “Who wanted to kick that field goal?” as his final Jeopardy! answer. Shewfelt’s answer referred to Rodgers’ Green Bay Packers losing last minute to eventual Super Bowl champs Tampa Bay Buccaneers. Being a professional, Rodgers took the moment in stride. Check out the NFL star’s response on Jeopardy’s Twitter below:
As evident by Jeopardy’s tweet, Aaron Rodgers knows how to maneuver around a bad moment. So, his preparation did pay off in some way. But this trolling moment doesn’t spell the end for Rodgers' time on Jeopardy! as his guest stint goes through April 16.
