To all the weisenheimers and Professor Professorsons out there: No, Matt Amodio didn’t lose his final Jeopardy! game on purpose because … just say it out loud. That’s absurd. Do you know how much money he was raking in? He got to $1,518,601! In a new op-ed in Newsweek, the megachampion responded to the popular social-media conspiracy that he purposely bowed out of the show when he felt like it, instead providing the reasonable explanation that he, uh, just had a mediocre 21 minutes of gameplay. “The day I lost, I went in feeling a little ‘off’ physically, but I had felt worse before and then won with no problem, so I didn’t think anything of it,†Amodio explained. “Then, I gradually saw that I wasn’t remembering things that I really should have been able to remember, and I was mis-reading clues in front of me. As that was happening, I began to see where the path ahead of me was leading … I don’t think my emotions or confidence played that much into it, what I did feel was that there was evidence that my mind wasn’t working at full capacity.â€
Amodio admitted that he was “very sad†upon losing his 39th Jeopardy! game but commended his slayer, Jonathan Fisher, for a well-earned victory. Still, the conspiracies continue to irk him a bit, all these days (and tens of thousands of followers) later. “I wasn’t being fed the answers when I was winning, and I didn’t throw the game when I lost. It’s just a competition, I was doing well and then I lost. There’s nothing more to it,†Amodio continued. “My buzzer was working fine. The only thing that wasn’t working was my brain at full capacity. The theories don’t upset me, people think all sorts of crazy things. But I do have the power not to acknowledge them.†So out of respect, leave him alone unless you want to buy him a Potent Potable.