Ken Jennings Talks Being a Lifelong Seattle Seahawks Fan: “I Think It’s Made Me a Better Person”

In my case, it was actually my 22-year-old son. My attempts to get him into Seattle sports when he was a kid didn’t actually work that well. But in college, he really got dialed into the Mariners in particular. He’s always telling me about which AAA prospects I should be keeping an eye on and has these outlandish theories about launch angle and BABIP [batting average on balls in play].

I remember him coming to me after Week 5 or so and saying, “Are you watching this?” I honestly said, “I’m actually not.” He said, “You need to start watching this. They’re for real. This looks different.” I thought, I’m the host of Jeopardy!, but this 22-year-old kid is smarter than me, Seahawks-wise, so I’m going to watch.

For a while, I was like, “This is fun.” But there’s a difference between a fun team and a good team, and it didn’t flip for me until very late in the season. The other thing that I can’t really get over from a fan perspective is how cathartic this run has been. To go through the 49ers twice, then the Rams, and now they have to play the Patriots in the Super Bowl—it’s a lot of demons being exorcised.

It really is how you would line it up in a John Wick movie. They’ve got to beat this guy, then have to beat this guy, but then they have to beat the Patriots. Fingers crossed, knock on wood, it would be a nice arc. Those three Rams games alone are each classic in a way. It’s been fun to watch.

Where were you for the NFC Championship game?

I was on an airplane. We were taping Jeopardy! the next day and there was no game time [announced] when I booked the flight. In fact, we didn’t even know they were going to be in the game when I booked the flight. I missed a bunch of the first half. Then I got to LA and I had seven Jeopardy! scripts. There were a lot of words to go over, and I am just not on the page where I should be. My eyes are flipping back and forth to the TV because I’m so distracted by that game.

The new version of the Los Angeles Rams, they seem like a team from a movie to me. There’s something about their uniforms that feels like an unlicensed football team from Any Given Sunday.

That’s exactly what I was going to say. They’re like the LA Colossus.

I really got into the Seahawks during the Matt Hasselbeck-Shaun Alexander days. During that time, their biggest rival was the St. Louis Rams, who just felt like a completely different entity than this.

Yeah. My problem is, being even older than you, I still think of the Broncos and the Raiders as the Seahawks’ enemies from when they were in the AFC. I had a big Dave Krieg poster on my wall as a kid. Because it was framed for some reason, it got saved. Now my son has it up in his college apartment, with the bright royal blue, which is a Seahawks look I still like actually.

That is my one wish. It’s getting greedy, now, to want more from the Seahawks. But I’d love to go back to the throwback jerseys.

I can’t even tell if it’s pleasant nostalgia or if they’re objectively better. But at my age, I’ll settle for pleasant nostalgia.

The current jerseys with the neon green feel very energy drink-coded. You know what I mean? The time has come.

They’re not going to age well. All the Color Rush jerseys are going to age terribly. We’re going to watch those games and it’ll be like watching all that teal and pink Miami Vice sports from the late ’80s.

I fear, because the Seahawks won the Super Bowl in them and now they might win a second one, that they’re going to stick with these jerseys for a while. It’s the same thing the Patriots had with Tom Brady. Their jerseys were kind of meh, but they had to keep them because they were so associated with winning.

I never know if that’s on-the-field superstition. I assume it’s more like people crunching numbers. Oh no, fans are going to want to buy the jerseys we won in. Plus, [with the Seahawks’ old jerseys], it was the Kingdome. You had that weird AstroTurf green on your TV. It’s a totally different aesthetic than even the Hasselbeck era.

I was going to ask you about your Kingdome memories. I remember being four or five years old and thinking, “This place feels off.” Even as a toddler, I could feel that something was not right in there.

The vibes were terrible. But my dad worked downtown, and occasionally we would go down and meet up with him after work and go to a Sounders game. ​​We’d go to Mariners games in the summer, or a boat show. I never went to a Seahawks game until Lumen Field, but I went to the Kingdome a ton.