Dear Gossips,

Do you think it’s at all possible that Aaron Rodgers will end up being the permanent host of Jeopardy? He started his two-week residency yesterday and already there’s been a viral moment (which he predicted). During Final Jeopardy, the champion Scott Shewfelt didn’t know the answer so he decided to shoot his shot instead.

And there was a follow-up to that behind the scenes:

Aaron is still officially a football player though. Like one of the most high-profile football players in the NFL so already there’s speculation that this is what he’s aiming for. I mean it should be obvious how competitive he is. Right now he’s competing against several others who want this job. And why wouldn’t he want it? There’s probably a lot more job security as the host of Jeopardy than what Aaron’s looking at in Green Bay.

Competitive for Aaron means ratings AND performance. He has been out there selling the sh-t out of his residency the last few weeks. So those first shots of him with Shailene Woodley that came out quite recently– coincidence or conspiracy?

To Aaron’s credit though, good ratings don’t matter if you’re sh-t at the podium. Which is why, apparently, he prepped for hosting Jeopardy like he preps for quarterbacking: studying the playbook obsessively and obsessively watching game tape.

“I watched hours and hours and hours of episodes,” Rodgers told Rob Demovsky of ESPN on Friday. “Luckily, Netflix has a few seasons, and I went back to DVR. But I had to watch from a different perspective — from Alex’s perspective. I couldn’t watch it as a fan anymore.

“I took pages and pages and pages of notes. I wrote down every affirmative that he said to any type of clue. I wrote down how he would respond if they didn’t get it right. I wrote down beat points of the show. I wrote down all the different ways he would take it to break. I wrote down the stuff that he said coming out of break. Literally, I studied for this like no other. I wanted to absolutely just crush it.”

Crushing it on the football field for a quarterback means your opponents have no counter for the plays you’re calling. Crushing it while hosting Jeopardy means, well, as Aaron put it, “they weren’t ready for me”:

“I know they didn’t expect what I was about to bring, but I was just so prepared,” Rodgers said. “I was so ready. So we get into the first game, the first run-through, there’s 30 questions in a Jeopardy round, and after the first 15 questions, we go to break. They say it in your earpiece, ‘Take it to break.’ So I take it to break, and there was a pause, and I think everyone was like, ‘Whoa, OK, this guy kind of knows what he’s doing here.’

“One of the head producers said as much. She was like, ‘I’m just so appreciative of your approach.’ And my whole thing was I felt like the best way to honor Alex’s memory was to be so dialed in and so ready, and that’s the approach I took. So I was ready to rock and roll.”

Um, this is trash talk. Aaron Rodgers is a known trash-talker on the field. And, word is, a pretty creative one. What he’s doing here with Jeopardy is he’s telling everyone else who’s coming for the job – Dr Oz, Ken Jennings, all the rest of them – that he did the work, that he impressed the Jeopardy team, that all the other host hopefuls might have not had their eye on him as a worthy adversary, and he used this to his advantage and is on his way to the endzone.

I mean… it’s been one day. So let’s not call it after one drive. He does still have some work to do, in my opinion, on his delivery. Aaron’s a bit monotone, his voice is kinda flat. I’m not saying he has to be a total cheeseball and go nuts with the vocal variations but he could dial it up maybe 15%. It would have made a difference with this joke:

Anyway, if you watched Aaron’s first episode on Jeopardy, will you watch his second and third? Will you watch every episode the next two weeks? Would you accept it if he ends up being Alex Trebek’s successor?

Yours in gossip,

Lainey

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