Friday’s Exhibition Game

The biggest consideration about last year’s edition doesn’t carry over to this one. Since this game was never intended for TuneIn Radio first, there aren’t any audio-only considerations.

The show has four options when it comes to positioning this game:

1. Before the quarterfinals

2. After the quarterfinals

3. After the semifinals

4. After the final series

Purely from the perspective of the unfolding of the tournament to the viewers, the first two options (the latter of which was used in 2022) are equally preferable. The fourth, which is what we got last year to start the 2025 JIT on a Monday, is close behind. In that position, it works akin to the exhibition gala in figure skating at the Winter Olympics, as another chance to see some competitors after all the prizes have been awarded.

Option 3 is what the show actually did, and I think it’s by far the worst choice. You had Laura Faddah coming back to play again two days after she had been eliminated. When the final gets underway today, it gives rise to people possibly wondering why TJ Fisher is up on stage and not Laura.

In this season, option 1. New media rights deals kicked in for the 2025-26 NBA season. As a result, three games aired on NBC Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, over nine hours — bumping Jeopardy! on all but one of that network’s affiliates that air it. Viewership is probably most impacted by 70 television markets moving the show to a different time or channel. That’s the best parallel to Election Day 2022 — and thus, was the ideal placement for the exhibition.

While this may have been so in Season 42, I’m not sure how much that serves as a precedent going forward. With the NFL (and Jeopardy!) schedule shifting a week later in 2026-27, the Farmers Insurance Open moves back to the NFL conference championship weekend. The MLK games on NBC would presumably remain. And a new player enters — ABC will simulcast ESPN’s telecast of the College Football Playoff National Championship Game beginning next season.1 That’s three significant impacts from sports, each on a different network, in the second half of January 2027. And of course, we have no idea where exactly the postseason will land in Season 43. (In fact, as I explain below, the show may have an entirely different outlook regarding how these events will impact where the tournaments are landed.)

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The Jeopardy! Fan proffered two explanations that are neither mutually exclusive nor contradictory. On Monday:

I guess I get where the production staff was going when it came to putting the exhibition game on Friday—I’m sure their ratings data tells them that viewership drops off slightly on a Friday—but I’m skeptical that the ratings difference can be outweighed by the increased confusion that will ensue by airing these games out of order.

And on Friday:

In past years, the PGA Tour’s Farmers Insurance Open—played this weekend in San Diego—has been played on Wednesday through Saturday, with third-round coverage airing on Friday on CBS and causing widespread preemptions on that network. However, with this being the “weird” year in the calendar where Labor Day is on September 7 and the TV schedules have to find an extra week to “catch up”, the NFL’s conference championship games aired a week earlier than the Farmers Insurance Open, the golf from Torrey Pines didn’t need to be played Wednesday through Saturday, instead being played in a normal Thursday to Sunday fashion—leading to there not being any pre-emptions to worry about. Unfortunately, the show appears to have been skittish about not wanting an important game pre-empted, so we have the situation we have here.

I think it’s the former — preemptions didn’t play into the thinking at all here. My initial reaction to reading that second quoted passage was: the producers just. said. they’re not moving this season’s JIT on account of the Winter Olympics. Not only that, they brought the start of the postseason forward, causing a Second Chance game to be preempted on all ABC stations on Christmas Day by the NBA.2 Plus, if they really were concerned about preemptions, they’d have aired the exhibition game on January 19, as I explained earlier.

It would seem to strain credulity to suggest that the show would have thought about preemptions, but would not have looked into what was actually going to impact the schedule. But I do also recall that when the Jeopardy! Honors winners were initially posted to social media, they unthinkingly re-used the template from last year, resulting in listing the wrong award title for Stella Trout:3

Now, I imagine the people drawing up the graphics for social media and those responsible for keeping track of preemptions aren’t the same. But it’s indicative of a mindset of “we’re just going off what happened last year,” and thus could back up TJ!F’s thinking. That said, the simpler rationale set out on Monday seems to me the more likely one. Let me give you another image the show put out in October, along with the text “The limit = nonexistent”:

Jeopardy! and Wheel of Fortune, now that they have the next-day streaming option, appear to be trying hard to inculcate the expectation that there’s no longer any such thing as a truly unavailable episode anywhere in the country. They’ve adopted a default presumption that viewers who are interested enough will avail themselves of the “rolling five” on Hulu or Peacock.

If any threshold for the calendar to be impacted by preemptions remains, it’s likely a very high one — something that would take out normal airings across multiple networks for a significant chunk of time, like Presidential (and midterm?) election coverage, or Thanksgiving and Black Friday. And the current placement of the postseason takes those events out of the picture.

I think it was as simple as “air the game with no stakes on a day of the week that typically draws lower viewership.”

I thought it was kind of meh. As much as Ken tried to inject levity and relieve stress particularly through his reference to the money in front of the players being “imaginary,” they really played it straight. Most representative of this was neither Paolo nor Laura going all-in on their Daily Doubles in Double Jeopardy. Of the thirteen Triple Stumpers, eight were stand-and-stares.4 That contrasts to Matt Amodio commenting in 2022 that he would attempt to buzz on every clue whether he had any inkling of the correct response or not. Nor did we get anything akin to the accidental slip of a correct response by Ken and his subsequent profanity.

Besides the commentary on placement, in TJ!F on Friday, Andy Saunders also mentioned that his prediction model has convinced him that the game is not necessary for the seeded semifinalists. I’d be interested in him elaborating how that change of mind came about.

Are compliance concerns in play here? If so, that would mean Sullivan Compliance has changed its position since 2005. Then, in the Ultimate Tournament of Champions, the nine players with byes into the second round got the same buzzer warmups as the 45 first-round winners. (Eight of them lost in that round, but the ninth was Brad Rutter, who won the entire tournament.)

A deep dive on this Winter Olympics/JIT decision. In short: the reasons the show gave are bovine fecal matter, but it’s justifiable on other, unstated grounds (that I mentioned in passing above).