Non-Sports: AUGH! We got it again!!!

(Wrote the most of this at about 3:45 - 4 PM Pacific today.  Held it until West Coast airings.)

I would really like to know what the Hell has gotten into all of us.

It seems that, this time, not only was there the open-faced "FIRST!" desire, evident when every news source under the sun notified us the morning after Ken Jennings' loss was taped, but it seems that it has propagated like wildfire to a truckload of trolls and Nelson Muntz-jobs to make sure it got propagated everywhere!

By about 2:45 PM, I had found this spoiled on:

• My most recent post on the status of this streak and how close the person involved was to the two remaining sacred records in game shows.
• Yahoo! had made it a news item about how many fans are pissed off that the result was leaked, as early as 11 AM Pacific, if not before!
• Deadspin too...
• A leaker got into one of my YouTube comments and propagated the spoiling that way...

And, according to my anonymous friend, the two New York tabloid newspapers actually spoiled this SUNDAY FUCKING NIGHT!!!  And no less than about 5-6 PM Pacific too!!!

Surprisingly, as of writing, ESPN (who has done more coverage on this guy than basically anyone outside the show) has NOT spoiled it.

What is it?

Well, unless you're under a rock today, you already know (but I will still withhold the blog post until most of the scheduled airings have taken place):

Flamboyant professional sports gambler James Holzhauer was defeated today on Jeopardy!.

Holzhauer had made mincemeat of the record books for the show over a six and a half week reign of terror (which the show had no problems openly exploiting for ratings) which gave comparisons to the last super-champion on the show, 74-game winner Ken Jennings...

Today represented two ironies:

• Over the weekend, we had just passed the 15th anniversary of the beginning of Jennings' regular-season run.
• If Holzhauer had won today with anything approaching his nearly $77,000 average, he would've become the greatest winner in the history of the show for regular play -- he would have eclipsed Jennings' $2,522,700 regular-season total on the show.

That number is one of only three superlative Jeopardy! records Holzhauer leaves the show not having taken:

• The second is not being able to eclipse a neutralizing metric invented by Jeopardy! contestants to gauge game-to-game skill.  The Coryat Score is a metric created to take answers at their stated value only and score that way.  Holzhauer's best was $38,200, $1,000 short of Jennings' best.
• The third is the amount of money won on Jeopardy!, first place held by all-time all-shows grand champion Brad Rutter, who, of his $4,888,440 (plus two mid-2000s Chevrolet Camaros, given to him as a five-time retiring champion while that was in force), won all but about $100,000 on Jeopardy!.

To give you an idea of how ridiculous Holzhauer's run was...

• The pre-Holzhauer record for the highest one-game winning total was $77,000.  Holzhauer bested it SIXTEEN TIMES, including six six-figure victories and two over $130,000.
• He leaves the show with, of the 25 top one-day totals, 21 of them.
• Holzhauer was the first player in history to break the $18,000 raw limit on the Jeopardy round -- and he did it SIX TIMES.
• He had the top Daily Double wager ($25,000, twice),
• the top Final Jeopardy wager (somewhere between eight and twelve times over)
• the highest score at the end of Double Jeopardy (between ten and sixteen times over)
• the most answers given to the contestants without that contestant missing (the record is now over 250 (over four full shows), and he had another run of 187 answers heard without him missing as well!)
• the most correct answers given in a game without a miss (44, and he had five other shows in which he had also beaten the pre-Holzhauer highest record for a perfect game)
• a winning way that meant, over the course of his run, according to how much host Alex Trebek is stated to make, outearned the host of the show by over or just about one million dollars.
• and a SIGNIFICANT ratings bump for the show, as the show made no secret of advertising the presence of the next great Jeopardy! super-champion.

So why this post?

BECAUSE WE SEEM TO HAVE A FUCKING NATIONAL OBSESSION WITH SPOILING PEOPLE AND THEN POINTING AND LAUGHING AT OUR REACTIONS.

That's why.  :)

I still recall how pissed I was when no less than the Associated Press spoiled Jennings' loss at 3 AM the morning after it was taped.  On the sports-talk radio stations in San Francisco, that was the only true newsbreak they took on their schedule.

I seem to recall an incident involving someone spoiling Avengers: Endgame, and getting violently beaten over it.

Though I have to hand it, on a lighter and final note, to one professor:

I forget precisely where, but the professor told the students he'd read all of the relevant books of the Game of Thrones series just completed.

If the class acts out, he tells them the next character(s) to die.  :)  :)  :)