As a Jeopardy! fan, I now see the wisdom in that franchise’s decision not to hire Aaron Rodgers as permanent host. It is “the spirit of Jeopardy!,” the New York Times’ James Poniewozik wrote in an appreciation of the departed Alex Trebek, “to care about getting things right…a place to go where it is OK to know things.”
In the past week Rodgers, the Green Bay Packers star quarterback, hardly came across as someone who has all the answers. Amid a stream of misinformation, he argued that he had done his own research about Covid vaccines and, as a “critical thinker,” had come to the conclusion that the shots are linked with infertility and that NFL protocols to fight the virus are “shame-based…not based in science” and don’t make sense to him.
His claim in August, when asked this summer if he was vaccinated, that he was “immunized” was a fabulist dodge, and now that he has tested positive for the virus, is insisting he was better protected by the veterinary de-worming drug ivermectin, which has been dismissed by the CDC as ineffective.
Critical thinking, indeed. Though Rodgers is an exceptionally gifted athlete, a 17th-year pro and the league’s reigning MVP, he is no epidemiologist schooled in medical science. In fact, he did not graduate from the University of California, where he majored in American Studies while he played football.
Rodgers does have an honorary degree, awarded him in 2018 by the Medical College of Wisconsin for helping raise money for cancer research. But his recent funhouse mirror distortions regarding Covid protection have severely dented any medical credentials he may have had, causing him to lose a nine-year health-care sponsorship deal with a Green Bay-based physicians group.
His assertion of having surpassing knowledge of Covid is no more coherent than that of basketball star Kylie Irving, suspended by the Brooklyn Nets for refusing vaccination. Irving, who once insisted that the Earth is flat, also has cited personal research for his decision.
To that, former New York Knicks coach and ESPN basketball commentator Jeff Van Gundy told Richard Dietsch on Dietsch’s Sports Media podcast, “If you choose not to get a vaccine, as crazy as it sounds to me, please don’t insult us all with, you know, that your research is going to turn up something that all these brilliant doctors, around the world, so heavily invested,” have learned. “It would be as absurd to me as asking a doctor how Kylie Irving should work on his crossover game and his handle. Like, that guy thinks that he knows more about that than a basketball guy?”
(Irving, like Rodgers, also is operating without a college degree. He attended Duke University for one year and did not study medicine.)
Whether it is Covid fever settling in, or just how Rodgers has felt all along about his superior knowledge of all things, he is calling himself a victim of “cancel culture,” “woke mobs” and media “witch hunts;” maintaining that the NFL denied his appeal to be exempted from protocols, agreed upon by the players’ union that included mask-wearing in press conferences and player meetings, because league officials “thought I was a quack” for his immunization alternative.
So, regarding Rodgers’ Jeopardy! tryout: Poniewozik’s Times evaluation was that, on the show, “there were not alternative facts, only actual ones. They did not change depending on how you felt about them or the person revealing them.” Trebek, the man Rodgers hoped to replace, was seen as perfect for the role by all-time Jeopardy! champ Ken Jennings because he was “the voice of fact in a post-fact world.”
Here’s the question, Jeopardy! style: Who is Aaron Rodgers?