And We Have a Winner!

Hey, academic bowls and trivia teams can pay off. Ask Ryan Fox.

Fox is a recent University of Georgia Ph.D. who won $18,000 during two nights on “Jeopardy!” broadcast in late July. When he learned during filming that there would be a second night, he was startled.

“When the announcer Johnny Gilbert says, ‘And our returning champion,’ and that applies to you, you’re just in awe,” Fox said. “I felt like I’d wake up from this dream. It was too strange to believe.”

A native of Marietta, Fox was graduated from the university with both a master’s and a doctorate in mathematics education. He now is on the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania—Abington.

To appear on “Jeopardy!” Fox took an online quiz in January 2010. He then took a face-to-face quiz and had an interview in Raleigh a few months later. In February of this year, he heard from the show: they asked him to fly out to Los Angeles.

“In high school I was involved with an academic bowl team. As an undergrad I did college bowl,” Fox said. Since he finished college, he’s done recreational trivia nights at restaurants and bars.

“The night before the in-person audition, I grabbed a stack of Trivial Pursuit cards and started to go down the questions one by one to be sure I knew all the answers,” he said.

And his work apparently paid off. The episodes aired on July 26 and 27, but it was filmed in March, a few days after he turned in his dissertation and right before he got his job.