Friday, May 12, 2017 Game Recap & Discussion [SPOILERS]

[Elijah Baley]

I guess we all have our strong and weak categories, but Montana's history certainly transcends the usual player-alma mater factoid.

That might have been true ~30 years ago, but I doubt it's that well-known now. I don't know that I would've gotten it were I not a sports fan, and I'll be 40 later this year.

I agree that knowing Montana's alma mater would be a bit esoteric even for sports fans. The guy retired more than 20 years ago and while he was one of the best, he's not as iconic as Joe Namath, for example (and I don't know where Namath went to undergrad). I knew Montana from having lived in SF - and being old - but I think it would have polled below 50%.

[Bamaman]

I knew where Montana went because I remember him playing there. I'm not old enough to remember Namath in college, but I know where he went.

[jeff6286]

Joe Montana is not as iconic as Joe Namath… I would strongly beg to differ with that assessment.

[dhkendall]

They accepted "The Pharaoh's Daughter" which was unexpected. I figured they were looking for a name.

Yeah, I screwed that up too. I guessed Cleopatra, which is a bad guess since she was in the last century BC and Moses is believed to have been about a millennium and a half earlier (and even if you assume I was referring to Cleopatra I rather than Cleopatra VII, that's only a century and a half back). Genesis and Exodus never identifies pharaohs, so you should allow yourself to be unspecific when responding to J! clues about Egyptian royalty. [Edit: one player got burned on specificity in FJ in this game.]

In fact, the Bible only names five total pharaohs (two of which correspond to historic pharaohs only by conjecture), and J! will never ask about them. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pharaohs_in_the_Bible

Thanks for the tip Sg... once they did ask about 'ruler of Egypt when Moses was found' and accepted "Pharoah", negged the incorrect response "Ramses (II)" who was his step-brother; no one offered the specific name of Seti I, so no idea if they would accept it, should've though IMHO!

Cite? That seems way too ambiguous a clue to have appeared on J!, considering not even Seti has been proven as the leader due to the Pharaoh in question not being mentioned in the Bible by name at all - "Pharaoh" is the only acceptable answer, and that makes the question far too easy.

It doesn't show up in an Archive search - this of course doesn't mean that it wasn't on the show since several episodes, almost all of them early ones (i.e. pre-season 20), aren't archived, but I highly doubt it. This may be one of those clues like the apocryphal one where they ask for the most accurate Bible translation (according to the myth it's the "New World" translation of the Jehovah's Witnesses) that people insist happened but there is zero proof that it did. You may be remembering another clue that didn't happen as well, goatman.

[Kenny]

With a ratio of 6 women to 3 men it seems likely the semis would each have one guy in each game. What that would not accomplish is to insure a woman making the finals, so I wonder if one semi will have 2 of the guys in the same match?

For regular games, the contestants are assigned randomly by an outside group. They're very sensitive to claims of fixing, so I'm guessing they do the same here. I suppose they could use a deterministic seeding algorithm, but I doubt they would.

While this is true in regular play, tournaments are a whole different kettle of fish. The matchups are definitely not random.

I would think the semis are seeded much like the NCAA basketball tourney, with the top three scorers from week 1 playing on Monday, Tuesday & Wednesday. Then the others placed accordingly by their dollar total.

[hbomb1947]

Instaget FJ.

The Oxford/Cambridge clue was neg-bait. Someone upthread wrote that people in the humanities are more associated with Oxford, and one of the graduates mentioned in the clue was John Milton. So . . . At the $600 level, I feel the writers should have given someone clearly associated with Cambridge, like Newton or Hawking.

I guess we all have our strong and weak categories, but Montana's history certainly transcends the usual player-alma mater factoid.

That might have been true ~30 years ago, but I doubt it's that well-known now. I don't know that I would've gotten it were I not a sports fan, and I'll be 40 later this year.

I agree that knowing Montana's alma mater would be a bit esoteric even for sports fans. The guy retired more than 20 years ago and while he was one of the best, he's not as iconic as Joe Namath, for example (and I don't know where Namath went to undergrad). I knew Montana from having lived in SF - and being old - but I think it would have polled below 50%.

Really? You dismiss Montana, who at least before Brady came along was widely regarded as the greatest NFL quarterback of all time, as "esoteric." And then you claim that Namath, who was known for one game and retired 3 years before Montana's rookie season, is somehow less esoteric and "more iconic." Montana was and still is very famous for engineering numerous last-minute comeback victories, including in multiple postseason games -- and in the Cotton Bowl that capped his career at Notre Dame.

[Bamaman]

Joe Montana is not as iconic as Joe Namath… I would strongly beg to differ with that assessment.

I agree. Montana was a much better quarterback, but Namath transcended football and became a cultural icon. He appeared in numerous commercials and on an episode of The Brady Bunch. The one game he is known for is one of the best known games in Super Bowl and NFL history.