So I'm sitting here, aimlessly going down the blog roll and watching Jeopardy in the background, when Alex Trebek asks the following $2,000 question under the category, 'Books of the Bible':
Few were "better than" this Cornell, who founded a university in 1865.
The answer was correctly questioned, thank goodness.
So one might think that this would be the first time Ezra's University would have ever been referenced on Jeopardy, but think again. Cornell has actually been referenced 29 previous times in questions, twice in Final Jeopardy.
The answers seem to be pretty well-rounded, most referencing Cornell in the Ivy League and as a land-grant university, but some deal with such topics as Keith Olbermann, Bill Nye, and the colors of a Campbell Soup can.
The hardest question I found?
Older than his classmates, Cornell football player & future coach Glenn Warner got this nickname
Which stumped me.
What's a bit harder to track down is how many Cornell alums, students, staff, or faculty have appeared on the venerable quiz show. The J! Archive indicates that at least one individual has appeared on Jeopardy as a Cornell graduate student, and one teenager indicated he would like to attend either Cornell or BU. Let's hope he chose the school with the better hockey team.
And for those of you keeping track at home, here's how Cornell stacks up against the other Ivies in Jeopardy references:
Harvard -- 154 Questions, 25 Contestants
Yale -- 136, 8 Contestants
Princeton -- 76 Questions, 6 Contestants
Cornell -- 30 Questions, 2 Contestants
Columbia -- 24 Questions, 8 Contestants
Dartmouth -- 16 Questions, 2 Contestants
Brown -- 12 Questions, 5 Contestants
UPenn -- 10 Questions, 10 Contestants
Penn and Brown might be a bit harder to identify in the archive due to the somewhat generic nature of their names and the need to also search for 'University', and it's impossible to know how many contestants have appeared without referencing their alma mater.
