A Philly-area university prof is competing in the Jeopardy! tournament of champions

As Joshua Weikert shared ground rules for quizzes in his early morning international relations class, he sought to put his students at ease.

“I don’t want you stressing out about these,” he said Tuesday, as the new semester got underway at Immaculata University in Chester County. “I myself was a terrible student.”

Weikert, 47, of Collegeville, may not have been a star student, but he sure knows a lot.

The politics and public policy professor will compete on Jeopardy! 2026 Tournament of Champions at 7 p.m. Friday on ABC, having won six games when he was on the show in March.

Over a couple weeks, Jeopardy! shows will feature him vying against 20 other champions, including Allegra Kuney, a doctoral student at Rutgers University’s New Brunswick campus, and Matt Massie, a Philadelphia lawyer who moved to the area in 2024, who also will appear on Friday’s show.

Friday’s match is a quarter-final, and if Weikert wins, he’ll advance to the semifinals. (Kuney won her quarter-final Tuesday.)

Weikert won about $103,000 when he competed last year, 10% of which he donated to a memorial scholarship fund named for his late friend, Jarrad Weikel, a Phoenixville man who died unexpectedly at age 40 in 2022. The winner of the champions tournament —which will conclude sometime in early February — will take home a grand prize of a quarter million.

Weikert will watch the show Friday among family and friends — including his fellow contestant Massie — at Troubles End Brewing in Collegeville, which named one of its beers after him. It’s an English Bitter, one of Weikert’s favorites, called “Who is Josh?”

At Immaculata, a Catholic college where Weikert has taught since 2016, students and staff are stoked. A campus watch party is planned, President Barbara Lettiere said.

His appearance last year, she said, has put a welcome spotlight on the school and brought an outpouring of enthusiasm from alumni. On tours, some prospective students and their parents who spot Weikert have recognized him, she said.

“I never knew that this show was as watched as it appears to be,” she said. “Win or lose, Immaculata wins.”

Ben Divens, 19, said it’s “jaw-dropping” and “surreal” to know his teacher will compete in the Jeopardy! champion tournament.

“I knew from the first time I met him he was a super, super smart person,” said Divens, a prelaw major from Souderton.

“He’s guided us so much in our major already,” added Bailey Kassis, 18, a political science major from Fort Washington.

Weikert said he has watched Jeopardy! ever since he can remember, probably since 1984 when he was 6, and it came back on the air with Alex Trebek as host. He grew up just outside of Gettysburg in a family that loved to play games, he said.

“We took them very seriously, which is to say that they didn’t just let the kids win,” he said of his parents, both of whom had accounting degrees. “We were destroyed routinely in the games we played.”

About his performance as a student, he said he often skipped his homework.

“Just give me an exam,” he said, describing his attitude at the time. “I’ll pass it.”

He got his bachelor’s degree in international relations from West Chester University, master’s degrees from Villanova and Immaculata, and his doctorate from Temple. He also attended the Defense Language Institute Foreign Language Center, where he studied modern standard Arabic while serving in the U.S. Army.

In addition to teaching, he also works as a policy adviser to the Pennsylvania House of Representatives under state Rep. Joe Webster, a Democrat serving part of Montgomery County. He vets legislators’ ideas and offers ideas of his own.

“The only thing they’ve ever told me no on was [when] I tried to abolish the Pennsylvania Senate,” he said.

So many bills pass one body, then die in the other, he explained. If there were one legislative body where all House and Senate members served, that might be different, he said.

Weikert’s office walls are lined with framed newspaper front pages highlighting major events: “Nixon Resigns,” “Nazis Surrender,” “Man Walks on Moon,” “Kennedy Shot to Death.”

“Every once in a while, I just get up and read one of the stories,” he said.

He got them from his mother-in-law’s basement and put them up after his wife told him his office needed some decor.

Weikert’s status as a Jeopardy! champion makes clear he’s a fast thinker. He’s also a fast talker.

“I don’t really drink caffeine. I just talk this fast,” he told his students.

His wife, he told the class, tells him to slow down.

“Keep up,” he tells her, he said.

Since his mid-20s, Weikert has been trying to get on Jeopardy!. Years ago, he got a call from the game show, but he put the caller on hold to get to a quiet place. They hung up.

“I was like, well, I guess I missed that opportunity,” he said.

But he kept trying and started taking the online tests, which typically draw 200,000 participants annually. In 2024, he got an email, inviting him to take the test again — and then again under Zoom surveillance.

Next came a virtual audition and practice game in August 2024. That earned him a place in a pool of about 3,000 people, of whom a few hundred eventually became contestants.

Weikert got the call last January and was invited to fly to California the next month to compete.

In reality, his varied interests and life path had already prepared him for the show. He reads a lot. He’s a fan of historical fiction, pop culture, and movies. His work as a public policy scholar helps, too.

But to try and up his game, he read plots of Shakespeare plays and a book on great operas. He flipped through lists of presidents and vice presidents. His wife, Barbara, a Norristown School District middle school music teacher, read questions to him from old Jeopardy! shows. He knew about 80% of the answers, he said.

That, however, didn’t stop him from having panic dreams of being on stage and knowing nothing.

The toughest category for him, he said, is popular music. Movies, history, and politics are his strongest.

But the hardest questions, he said, are the ones with four or five strong possible answers.

“Getting a Jeopardy! answer right is more about knowing what it’s not than what it is,” he said.

Ultimately, he said, it’s impossible to really study for the game show.

“The odds that something you study would come up is almost zero,” he said.

It was an intense experience on stage last March, but the staff put contestants at ease, he said. Host Ken Jennings, formerly one of the show’s most successful contestants, told them, according to Weikert: “I promise you something today is going to be a win for you, so just relax and have fun.”

He has a hard time remembering his winning answers. He readily recalls his dumbest, he said.

The answer was “sacred cow.” He uttered “holy cow.”

“Even as it was coming out of my mouth, I knew it was wrong,” he said.

He’s proud that he only froze on one answer involving lyrics from the B-52’s “Love Shack,” he said.

There was less pressure competing in the championship match last month, given he was already a winner, he said. But it was harder in that the contestants were the best of the best.

“During the regular season, it’s a little under a quarter of a second between when you can start to buzz in and when the buzz actually comes,” he said. “In the tournament of champions, that drops to 0.08 seconds.”

This time, he also prepped by reading children’s books on topics such as basic cell biology, a tip he got from another contestant.

“It’s the simplest language they can use to convey the information,” he said.

He also read the book, Timelines of Everything: From Woolly Mammoths to World Wars.

He most enjoyed the camaraderie among contestants, he said. When filming was over, they hung out in a bar and — watched Jeopardy!.

“We were yelling out the answers,” he said.