Winter 2024 Champions Wildcard: Determining the Names for the Play-In Games
Some players from Season 39 will not be participating in the two upcoming Champions Wildcard tournaments. Let's theorize how this is going to go down.
Preparing for the 2024 Tournament of Champions
Season 40 has been a unique and polarizing experience for many Jeopardy! fans alike. When the writer's strike went under way during the summer, many of us didn’t know whether Jeopardy! would survive the fallout and we were then made even more uncertain when the Screen Actors Guild went through with a strike as well. It was a grueling summer for the workers, and the powers that be at Jeopardy! found themselves in a peculiar position when many of the season’s top players chose to boycott the Tournament of Champions set to air last month, in solidarity with the strikers, until a resolution was reached. With this unprecedented series of events, Sony Pictures had to think of a quick solution.
With the show’s hands tied, and the original post-season being postponed indefinitely, the showrunners took it upon themselves to host a series of competitions and tournaments featuring some of the most memorable players of the 37th and 38th seasons. Following three weeks of Second Chance winners, the showrunners followed up the competitions with four 27-player Champions Wildcard tournaments consisting of players who won one to three games, each tournament of which will feed one new player into the 2024 Tournament of Champions. The winners of the first three tournaments were Josh Saak for the Spades suit, Emily Sands for the Diamonds suit, and Nick Cascone for the Clubs suit. The first game of the two-day total point affair for the Hearts suit will air today, with the tournament winner being declared in the second game of the finals on Monday.
The feeding of newTournament of Champions qualifiers didn’t stop at the new Champions Wildcard tournaments, however. The show recently invited eight former Season 39 champions to the next TOC, each of whom won three games, with the players receiving an invitation in a series of local news interviews. Every individual 3-time champion was brought onto their respective network with the inclination that they’d be talking about their possible appearances in Champions Wildcard, seeing as how the first four tournaments each included players who won up to three games.
After a few short minutes of briefing in each conversation, all of the interviewers pulled up a video of Ken Jennings sending the contestants a personal message with the insinuation that they wouldn’t be brought back to the show. They wouldn’t be participating in Champions Wildcard… rather, they were each given a slot straight into the Tournament of Champions. The players returning are Yogesh Raut, Sean McShane, Emmett Stanton, Jake DeArruda, Brian Henegar, Melissa Klapper, Jared Watson, and Kevin Belle. This development marks the upcoming TOC as the first tournament to feature 27 players, the biggest class of players to date.
Champions Wildcard (Season 39)
On Monday, the 25th spot for the TOC will either go to Yungsheng Wang (3x, $84,202 + $2,000), Tyler Vandenberg (2x, $41,400 + $1,000) or Gary Hollis (Professors Tournament semifinalist, $10,000). This leaves two open spots, both of which will go to the winners of the Champions Wildcard tournaments for Season 39 players. With both tournaments containing 27 players, on the other hand, this poses a bit of a problem for some of the champions and fans of these champions. Since there are only 54 spots available, not every player will be able to compete in these tournaments. Following the 3-time champions being put straight into the main tournament, we are left with 57 champions from Season 39 to pick from.
Just like with Season 37 Second Chance winners being fed into the Champions Wildcard (Seasons 37 + 38) tournaments of 2023, there will also be four Second Chance winners being fed into the next two Champions Wildcard tournaments. One thing to note about these Second Chance invitations is that they include 2019 Teen Tournament players Sophia Weng and Rotimi Kukoyi, who were both alternates for the 2023 High School Reunion tournament. This tournament featured players from the two Teen Tournament events held in Season 35, with only 3 of the 30 players not participating, Kukoyi and Weng included.
The other Teen Tournament alum who couldn’t participate, second-place finisher Emma Arnold, is assumed by many to be one of the players invited back for Champions Wildcard, with the available knowledge regarding Weng and Kukoyi being slotted into Second Chance. Following this series of announcements, many people were speculating until last night, when Andy Saunders of The Jeopardy! Fan dropped a bombshell on his website blog: the lowest-ranking 1-time champions will all have to compete in untelevised play-in rounds. Let’s break down some math here:
Below Teen Tournament runner-up Emma Arnold and 18 2-time winners are 39 1-time winners from Patti Palmer to Devin Lohman. With four Second Chance winners also intended to be put into these tournaments, that gives us 62 players to work with. Since these play-in rounds are presumably going to be containing three players per game, like any normal game, the most likely outcome is that the bottom 12 players from Holly Hassel to Devin Lohman are going to have to play their way into the Champions Wildcard tournaments, leaving us with 50 players automatically slotted in. The four winners of these play-in rounds would then make up the two fields of 27 players, ultimately fulfilling the quota.
On the other hand, this speculation is hindered by another possibility. In the first four Champions Wildcard tournaments, three players from the 2021 Professors Tournament were invited back; runner-ups Ed Hashima and Alisa Hove, as well as semifinalist Gary Hollis. With Emma Arnold likely to be given an invitation into Champions Wildcard, we have to consider the possibility that the show may choose to give spots to other High School Reunion players. Hypothetically, we could have up to four more players be invited to participate. Strong contenders include Teen Tournament winners Avi Gupta and Claire Sattler, who both lost in the semifinals of HSR, as well as the two losing finalists of the HSR tournament, Jackson Jones and Maya Wright.
If these four players (or any other player from HSR for that matter) were to be added to the line-up of eligible players, we would then have 66 players to work with rather than 62. Instead of the bottom 12 players potentially needing to earn their spots through play-in rounds, it would be the bottom 18 players, leaving us with the top 48 players to work with. That would include everyone from Kelly Barry to Julie Sisson, along with the other 12. 6 of these 18 players winning their respective play-in rounds would then fulfill the quota of 54 players, 27 per tournament.
My Opinion On This Development
I’m not ideologically opposed to the idea of play-in rounds at all. With that said, I think for full transparency that it would be in the show’s best interest to allow these play-in rounds to be streamable online, whether it’s through YouTube, Hulu, or even the official website. I also think, given the lack of regular gameplay this season, that it might be beneficial to hold over the champions who don’t make it to the next post-season tournaments. They could very well extend the qualifying window as well, but if the show insists on these post-seasons becoming a regular part of the show’s scheduled bloc of episodes, they may as well make sure that these tournaments actually have enough players to work with.
I want to be excited for "the biggest ToC ever" but it does kinda diminish it a bit when it's going to be just one of eight or nine tournaments with the exact same size and format this season (including Celeb and assuming the JIT will also be 27 players) save for the finals.
I still think they should just skip the postseason next year and wait to kick season 42 off with a bigger one -- they probably think "if we don't do it next year then it's going to look like we abandoned it; we need to make it a regular thing right away" but i think following up the season of all tournaments immediately with another tournament that's just going to be a rerun of basically all of the people who just played a month earlier is going to be the perfect way to cement public opinion against the postseason -- but if they insist on starting 41 with a postseason, then i definitely agree that carrying over the pre-eliminated players from this CW is only fair.