It's "Selection Monday"

This afternoon or late this morning1, Jeopardy! will release the full field for the postseason to come later in Season 42. We expect that it’ll confirm the twenty direct entries to the Tournament of Champions and two into Champions Wildcard. We’ll also discover the remaining ten players in CWC (all one- and two-game champions) and the twenty-seven players who’ll contest Second Chance, selected subjectively by show staff.

At this point, there’s no value for me to add re: who should or will be picked; I’m content to just wait for the announcement.

Also likely is that the airing dates for the postseason will be made known; based on ticketing availability for days already taped, Second Chance should start on December 15, meaning four more weeks of regular play before the tournaments start.

We started this past week with Allegra Kuney bringing a three-game run in; she won a fourth before falling on Tuesday. I admit I may have been a little harsh on the show on social media. An email I got on Tuesday entreated me: “It’s the final week of the season to qualify for the next Tournament of Champions. Tune in to see if Allegra will pick up her fifth win and punch her ticket to the prestigious event.” Ken’s introduction to that night’s game did likewise.

That had me breathing deeply and figurative steam wisping from my ears, as I thought: “Allegra’s already in the ToC!! Her wins and money are good enough now! They were on Friday! If she wins out the week, she’s on eight wins and is guaranteed a spot for 2027!!” Why was the show misleading its viewers in this manner?

Of course, a day or two of hindsight reminded me that very few viewers track the ToC leaderboard on a granular basis, day by day, as I do. And for more casual viewers, it is perhaps better to consistently communicate “five wins gets a player in the ToC.” To borrow a phrase stuck in the back of my head: “it makes sense from a narrative perspective.”2

Kuney’s four-game run broke a streak of nineteen consecutive one-and-done women on the Alex Trebek Stage3 — and it took quite a player to unseat her from the first lectern. Harrison Whitaker, a veteran of the United Kingdom’s University Challenge, is whooping up and taking names. After Whitaker’s first win, those of us who are deep in the weeds on these things knew that only he could now displace Aaron Levine from the ToC, had he lost on Friday. As the week progressed, it became apparent that not only Levine but the entire 2026 ToC field exhaled a sigh of relief after Whitaker cemented his fourth win, carrying him over to the 2027 and de facto clinching a spot in that ToC.4

Here’s what the final standings look like, with per-game averages and game-by-game totals for all winners of three or more games.

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Of the 332 regular play contestants who were eligible to qualify for this postseason, 57 will, or 17.2%. That’s actually slightly down on last season (17.5%, 50 of 286).

The remainder of these numbers are based on the actual ToC qualification cycle (164 games), as opposed to the nominal cycle (166).5

• Champions: 73

  • men: 51 (129 games won); women: 22 (35 games won)

• Average winner’s streak: 2.247 games

• Average winner’s score: $20,685

  • Total payouts to players, including consolation prizes: $4,212,333

• Average combined Coryat: $34,056

  • Average winner’s Coryat: $16,920

• Aggregate Daily Double accuracy: 65.04% (317/492)

• Aggregate Final Jeopardy accuracy: 41.96% (201/476)

Histograms of the cycle’s winning streaks and winning scores:

The two outliers at the right are two of Scott Riccardi’s wins, both for $50,400.

This past Monday, November 10, there again was an instance where Jeopardy! did not sufficiently take precautions to redact the visibility of a correct response in a clue’s image. From NOSHING AT THE TEAM’S STADIUM $1000:

“Phillies” was visible to the home viewer on the bat to the right of the Schwarburger, and possibly also on the placemat underneath it.

I first wrote about the issue in this space two years ago, and in October last year, I mentioned that additional attention has to be paid to this possibility now that the gameboard is a single screen and clue images are much larger when shown to the players.

As reported in the trades: Deadline, Variety, The Hollywood Reporter. Here’s what happens when regarding Jeopardy! and Wheel of Fortune:

• December 1, 2025: International distribution transitions from CBS to Sony

• Following the 2025-26 season: Marketing, promotion and affiliate relations transition from CBS to Sony

• Following the 2027-28 season: Domestic distribution transitions from CBS to Sony

• Through the 2029-30 season: CBS takes over (maintains?) sole responsibility for advertising sales

The Jeopardy! Fan noted a week ago:

This will have a very small impact on how anyone watches the show until the end of the 2027-28 season; however, the fact that Sony is taking over distribution when it had already been hoping for same-day streaming to begin (instead of next-day) in the fall of 2028 fits in quite well with their plans. I do expect there to be a major shift in airtimes for both Jeopardy! & Wheel of Fortune, though, in the fall of 2028, potentially closer to prime time.

The last sentence there caught my attention — and not just because I think it has no practical impact on “the other side of the house,” so to speak.6 It’s interesting to juxtapose this against comments I recall by Robert Santoli — hopes that this season’s introduction of next-day streaming would liberate Wheel of Fortune from the strictures of its own syndication agreements dating back to the need to avoid overlaps with the network Wheel, which went off the air in 1991. I hadn’t considered the possibility that things might be the other way around — that Jeopardy! might become restricted as Wheel has been for so long.

Come the summer of 2028, who knows what the shape of broadcast television will look like? This is even more up in the air with the NFL having the potential to opt out of its media rights deals after the 2029 season. But from the standpoint of where we are right now, I can see stations and owners not being amenable to such a demand from Sony, should it eventuate. Jeopardy! time changes are rare, and when they do happen, are almost always in Central Time.7 Even so, in a lot of big Central Time markets, the show is well established in its current time slot (3:30 PM on WLS in Chicago, for example). Beyond the potential disruptions to game show viewers, there’s the matter of local newscasts to consider. Though Dallas’s CBS O&O, KTVT, scrapped its 6:00 news in favor of returning Jeopardy! from sister station KTXA two years ago, other stations may not be as receptive to following suit. For example, it’s likely that the airing time restriction on Wheel was part of the reason why it stayed at its longtime home of KHOU (CBS) instead of moving to KTRK (ABC) along with Jeopardy! in 2015; the latter did not want to disturb its 6:00 hour newscasts.

For the time being, the things to think about and be excited for are the reveals of the thirty-seven names joining the twenty already expected to be called later today.