Aaron Rodgers Wants to Be the Permanent Host of ‘Jeopardy!’

On Monday, Aaron Rodgers begins a two-week stint as the guest host of Jeopardy! Here, the Packers quarterback discusses his preparations for stepping into Alex Trebek’s shoes, how Celebrity Jeopardy! stacks up against the regular edition, and the rarefied art of bringing out the cool kid in our nation’s most nervous nerds.

Oh, and one more thing: Don’t count the reigning NFL MVP out of the race to be the permanent host: “I’m not shy at all about saying I want the job,” he says.

Before we get into you hosting Jeopardy!, I wanted to ask about your own history with the show. Was it something you grew up watching?

I definitely did. We would go to my grandma and grandpa’s house, and their favorite thing was watching Jeopardy! I was 7 or 8 and I never had any idea what was going on really—I mean, I was not able to answer any questions. It was more just the experience of sitting around a TV after dinner and watching a trivia show. Our family’s always been into trivia—I’ve always enjoyed board games and Trivial Pursuit.

I got drafted by the Packers at 21, and for years and years, I’d figure out when Jeopardy! was on. For the last 16 years, 6 p.m. on Fox 11 has been Jeopardy! time.

How did you end up guest hosting? Did Jeopardy! approach you?

Yes. And we definitely put some feelers out as well.

I was excited about it—I was in quarantine for the early part of the [NFL] offseason and I spent that time watching episodes and writing notes and practicing and learning the beat points of the show. That was the most important thing: to understand the show inside and out from the host’s perspective. It’s way different than being a fan just casually watching it and answering questions on your couch. Being able to actually control the game and understand every point of the game, and what can happen to usher the game through each of the beat points of the show—that was really important for me to totally grasp before I went on.

How specifically did you prepare for hosting? Jeopardy! executive producer Mike Richards told me you came in with a bunch of questions about rare scenarios.

I wanted to be really ready. In my preparation there were a few things that came up that I just wanted to make sure I had down. It’s taped, so there’s opportunity for pickups and redoing things, but I’m a perfectionist and I didn’t want to have a lot of those. I wanted to be really, really locked in. I made sure [to ask] any questions I had about specific scenarios that came up in certain games because I wanted to be as ready as I possibly could be.

What were the specific situations you were curious about?

Anything from the event of a tie at the end of a game, which, watching Jeopardy! for so many years, it’s maybe happened one time. But I wanted to get refreshed on that. And there were things I remembered from my own Celebrity Jeopardy! game [in 2015], where we actually stopped midgame to either reshoot something or change out a clue. There can be technological malfunctions. I just wanted to know—if this happens or that happens, how should I respond?

Mike was amazing to work with. I’ve had a coach in my ear for 16 years now telling me things, so it wasn’t that different to have Mike’s voice and Clay’s [Jacobsen, the director of Jeopardy!] voice in my ear for the majority of the show. I felt like we had a really good rapport on set.

I know a lot of players practice standing at a lectern or ringing in with a buzzer. Beyond just watching a lot of episodes, I’m curious if you practiced any of the physical aspects of hosting before you went to the studio.

I would watch the show on mute. That was a good way to practice. So you watch the show on mute and you practice reading the clues and then calling on the contestants. That was a fun way of doing it, because it’s different from when you’re sitting on the couch playing to when you’re controlling everything. You’ve got to learn the form. It’s looking down to read the clue and then looking up to call on a contestant, and also understanding what the answer is in case none of the contestants get it right, and then realizing at that point that you’ve got to work on your posture and where you’re looking and know who you’re talking to when you give that response. There were so many little things that were important for Alex being so smooth that I just wanted to be sure I had down.

That was one of the questions I asked Mike: How did Alex remember whose turn it was when nobody got the question right? I learned a little secret of Jeopardy!: There’s a little white light at the bottom of the [contestant’s] podium that tells you who’s up. And you learn that during Final Jeopardy!, you’re able to look at the podium and see what people are writing down.

This season’s guest hosts have had an extra day of rehearsal before they actually film their episodes, with the show’s writers and researchers standing in as players. What was that like?

That was a blast. These guys were hilarious. They tried to bring scenarios that might trip you up, like adding an “s” at the end of a word to pluralize something that made the answer not correct, or not answering in the form of a question during the Double Jeopardy! round. It was really helpful to me to have gone through these scenarios before it was actually live, so I could start to think about how I was going to respond in those situations. They were amazing and also really, really funny. It was great to be able to practice not just calling on contestants, but really listening to the answers they gave—to remember how to check with the judges, and the interview style and going through that whole thing.

Was there a trickiest part of it for you?

I think it’s more the enormity—once you get into the gameplay—of realizing how “on” you have to be. There’s no time to relax. You are literally dead-on focused. Every single time you read a response, it’s like there’s a flow chart of things that could happen. You have to understand every single scenario about how to respond and what to say: If this, then this. If they get the question right, what type of affirmative response do I want to give? If they get it wrong? What if nobody gets it right? If multiple people get it wrong and one person gets it right, how do I want to answer that person getting it right? There are a lot of different gameplay scenarios in each individual question and response. And there’s finding how to throw it to the first break, and what to say and where to look and how long to hold your gaze. [Laughs.]

Did it feel like your day job prepared you for that? It sounds kind of like what you might have to figure out on a football field.

For sure. What it takes to be successful on the field is incredible focus, but also an understanding of all things. As a quarterback, I don’t just have to know my job, I have to know every single person’s job on the field. So you have to get to the point where what you’re supposed to be doing comes so naturally that you can really tune into everything going on around you and just be able to react. That’s what Alex did for so long—his reactions were so incredible because he was ready for every scenario and didn’t have to think about what he was doing at the podium anymore. That’s what I was trying to get to in my headspace—to be so locked in on what I was doing that I could just react in the moment to any possible scenario that would come up. I think there was a lot of that poise that it takes to be a quarterback that I tried to take with me as the host.

Moving back in time a little—did you do any prep ahead of your Celebrity Jeopardy! game against Kevin O’Leary and Mark Kelly?

I did. There’s a website called J! Archive that I went on. They archive games. I went back and looked at the celebrity games to get a feel for it. I wasn’t necessarily thinking they would repeat questions, but I wanted to see what the level of difficulty seemed to be compared to a normal Jeopardy! game. It’s interactive where you can read a clue and click on it to get the answer. So I went back and played online a number of these celebrity games to try and just acquaint myself with new knowledge and understand the difficulty level that I should be expecting. So by the time I got to the game, I was prepared on what I thought the difficulty level would be.

But also what gave me a slight advantage, or maybe large advantage, was Mr. Wonderful didn’t really know Jeopardy! And Mark Kelly—people probably don’t know this because he’s a good man and wouldn’t say this, but two days before our taping, he had been in Kazakhstan seeing his brother off in space for a year. His brother’s also an astronaut. He flew back and was probably super jet-lagged. And I don’t know how big of a fan of Jeopardy! he was. Definitely they weren’t as big of fans as I was—I knew all the little things, the intricacies of the show, so I thought I was already well ahead as far as gameplay. It just came down to knowledge—and I felt like I was going to be in the mix, minimum, even though these guys were much older than me. I felt like I watched the show, I have a base level of intelligence that seems to be fairly high, and I felt good about my chances.

Based on your research, did you find that the difficulty of the celebrity edition is different than regular Jeopardy! games?

It was not as difficult, that’s for sure. I was teasing with Billy [Wisse], one of the head writers, about literature. They always try to keep some sort of literature category, whether it’s world literature or English literature or just literature, in every single game. Whether it’s in the Jeopardy! round or the Double Jeopardy! round or the Final Jeopardy! category, they’re going to get some literature in there.

There’s no literature in Celebrity Jeopardy! [Laughs.] Unless it’s super, super contemporary. There’s not going to be a lot of operatic categories either. There’s a certain niche of people who love the opera and, I mean, we all kind of appreciate the opera. But anybody who knows composers and conductors of certain operas, especially when you’re going back centuries ago? There weren’t any of those categories.

It felt more like a teen championship. Maybe just below a college championship.

Pivoting back to your time as a host, what was it like interacting with the contestants?

I had a blast with them. The thing I did with them that they told me was kind of like what Alex would do—before the game, they give you these cards for the three people with fun facts: their last name, where they’re from, what they do for a living. It’s based on a questionnaire they fill out. The set producer will highlight questions that they’ve prompted them on. But a lot of times when I read the fun facts I thought there was something way more interesting [than the highlighted part]. And maybe it’s just more interesting to me, but that’s where I would go. I’d say, “Hey [redacted], I’m going to talk about you and Burt Reynolds,” just to give them a little heads up before we come out of break.

But I’d try to get them talking about stuff that maybe wasn’t as nerdy. For any of the contestants who were doing athletic endeavors, I like to highlight those. One guy was training for a marathon—and like, I respect that because I don’t want to run 26.2 miles, so I got him talking about that. Another guy was a black belt in judo, and I was like, hey, tell me about this. I’ve spent so many years watching those interviews and some of those things seem super, super nerdy—like, wow, why would you admit that, almost. So I would try to choose facts that maybe highlighted some of their personality that wasn’t as nerdy.

So you didn’t get any furious Bears fans.

No. No, none of those.

Was the experience of being a contestant on your mind as you were hosting?

It definitely helps because you understand what the players are going through, and the nerves. Before the shows, I got to go out and meet them. I had read their cards at that point, so to disarm some of their nerves—and for me as well—I like to go out there and introduce myself, and say, “Hey, great to be with you.” Maybe say something funny about something I saw on their card or some sort of connection about where they’re from, just to get them to laugh and relax. Because I remember when I first went out onstage—like, I was so nervous, and then when Alex came out, I was barely able to get saliva to the front of my mouth to say a word.

A lot of people joke that Alex Trebek had the ultimate dream job on Jeopardy!—he was paid pretty well to work just 40-something days a year. So I’ve got to ask—would you ever consider giving up football to host Jeopardy!?

I don’t think I’d need to give up football to do it. They film 46 days a year. I worked 187 this year in Green Bay. That gives me, eh—[pauses]—178 days to do Jeopardy! So I feel like I could fit 46 into that 178 and make it work. It would be a dream job for sure, and I’m not shy at all about saying I want the job. That’s how I went into it. I want an opportunity to be in the mix.

I feel like I bring something different to the stage—I’m the youngest of any of the guest hosts, I’d be the youngest host of just about any major game show, I bring an audience from the NFL, and I feel like I appeal to nerdy people, too, because I was a nerd in high school and got caught in that weird phase of wanting to be a jock and an athlete and also really caring about getting good grades. And at the same time, there’s not many bigger fans of the show than me. I’ve been watching it for years and years and years. I respect the show and appreciate the history of it, and also there’s my background of stepping in for a legend and their footsteps. I feel like all that combined makes me a pretty good candidate.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.