Sports categories on on Jeopardy! tend to go one of two ways. When at least one of the contestants know sports, it’s usually one of the first categories to get cleared off of the board, as it’s an easy way to get a whole lot of money relatively quickly.
And then, there are the times that no one is especially well-versed in sports, which leads to clips like the one at the top of this post. Jeopardy! is in the midst of its High School Reunion Tournament, which is pitting former Teen Tournament contestants who are now in college against one another. On Thursday’s episode, the category “In The Sport” really tripped everyone up, to the point that no one got a single answer correct. The contestants were given a bunch of terms that apply to specific sports and were supposed to name where they came from, let’s see how you do:
$200: Inherited Runners, Appeal Play, Pickoff
$400: Best Ball, Casual Water, Closed Face & — The Absolute Worst — Shank
$600: Eight-Count, Accidental Butt, Cutman (For Said Accidental Butt)
$800: Penalty Killing, Plus-Minus, The Five-Hole, “The Biscuit” (That’s What Everyone’s Chasing)
$1000: Chukker, Gag Bit, Mallet, A Lot Of Money
These are, in order, baseball, golf, boxing, hockey, and polo. I will admit, in the interest of transparency and fairness to the contestants, I did not get polo.
Anyway, the star of the category was Caleb, who picked the $200 answer after saying he wanted to “get rid of” the category and then predicted “the internet’s gonna love that.” He is correct about that last thing, in part because it lets us remember the time Alex Trebek was in the same situation with a football category and absolutely roasted the contestants, to the point that he tried to remedy this not long after by writing an entire football category on his own.