PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio) — Eagles defensive coordinator Jim Schwartz didn’t realize it at the time, but he started training to be a coach while in college — by watching “Jeopardy!”
In Peter King’s Football Morning in America column from NBC Sports, he revealed Schwartz was an avid watcher of the game show in the late ’80s, championed by legendary host Alex Trebek, who died Sunday after a long and public battle with pancreatic cancer. He was 80.
Schwartz and his pals at Georgetown would watch the show and play along — to the point where Schwartz said it helped in his maturation as a football coach.
“You look back and you see the lessons learned from stuff like that, and you see the carryovers to football,” Schwartz later said to the media.
Schwartz admitted that at that time in his life, he didn’t realize he was learning traits of how to be a coach — specifically, a defensive-minded coach — but he eventually recognized that was the case.
“Jeopardy!” clues must be answered quickly, and the same applies to coaching football.
“When you’re a defensive coach, in particular, you’re reacting when you make your play calls,” he said.
“I’ve always talked to football players about this. It’s like, ‘What’s two plus two? Four.’ And somebody else says, ‘Two plus two,’ and they go,” he paused and counted slowly, “ ‘four.’ Well, both of them got the right answer, but the other one — the ball was snapped and the running back just ran right past ya.”
In addition to the similarities, Schwartz also admired Trebek’s sharpness and style.
“I thought it was always interesting. You never knew if he really knew the answer or it was just he sold it because it was written on his card,” he said. “Just having command over the game and the players. I think the other thing — he did it for so long, he had such consistency, and it didn't happen by mistake. He was such a professional. He never flubbed a word. He never flubbed a syntax. So you knew that every question he had read probably 20 times, and that’s a lot of questions on the board. He prepared himself, and it showed in his performance.”
Practice, command, quick-thinking, competitiveness — it all carried over to football from “Jeopardy!”
“Those are the lessons that I learned from just watching a silly game show on TV,” said Schwartz.