Eight nights in, Aaron Rodgers as “Jeopardy!” guest host is starting to feel familiar — so much so that Wednesday’s show felt like business as usual.
Oh sure, we noticed how he’s changing up the “corrrrr-ect” response he relied heavily on in Week 1 with a “you are right” and a “you got it,” how he put his hand over his heart to announce another $27,401 charity match to help out small businesses through the North Valley Community Foundation and how viewers continue to gush on Twitter about his “comedic timing, charm & those eyes ...”
Almost standard stuff at this point, right? So let’s detour to that Rodgers vs. Corey Linsley “Jeopardy!” matchup not likely to ever happen but that has proven to be amusing nonetheless.
It started when Rodgers was asked in a Los Angeles Times interview if he were to face off against other NFL players as a contestant, who does he see as his toughest competition. He mentioned former Green Bay Packers teammate and current Cleveland Browns center J.C. Tretter and Washington Football Team quarterback Ryan Fitzpatrick. Both “brilliant,” he said.
“One guy I would love to beat — love, love, love to beat — is one of my former teammates now, Corey Linsley,” Rodgers said. “Corey, who has been our center for a number of years, just signed with the L.A. Chargers. Corey is really brilliant. There is no one I would want to beat more if we were both contestants than Corey Linsley.”
That led Los Angeles Chargers team reporter Hayley Elwood to take the challenge directly to Linsley.
“What he’s doing, is he’s talking up the competition,” Linsley told Elwood. “You never want to give anybody bulletin board material! But the other thing is, you want to make your opponent look as good as he can and pay him respect. There’s some level of respect there. But he’s mostly saying that so when he smokes me on ‘Jeopardy!,’ everybody can look at him like he’s Einstein.”
But if Rodgers and Linsley should ever go buzzer to buzzer on “Jeopardy!” one day, Linsley, an Ohio native, joked about which categories he might ace and which might be better suited for his former teammate.
“I’d be good at certain categories like Midwestern geography, grit, manual labor, manners,” Linsley said. “Aaron would win in categories like golf, yachting, anything California. Met Gala attire is another category Aaron would excel in. More the ‘refined-lifestyle’ categories. But all in all, there’s no question he’d beat me for sure.”
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