Mina Kimes‘ degree in English from Yale served her well in the finale of “Celebrity Jeopardy! All-Stars”: The ESPN football analyst correctly answered the show’s game-deciding trivia question to win the $1 million top prize for her charity.
The show’s final episode, which aired Firday evening on ABC, featured Kimes squaring off against actor-comedians Ike Barinholtz and Steven Weber.
Going into Final Jeopardy!, Kimes had a score of $12,500; Weber followed with $10,500; and Barinholtz stood at $5,100. The clue in the category, “Name’s the Same,” was: “It’s the name of an 1873 novel subtitled ‘A Tale of Today,’ a period of U.S. history & a TV drama that debuted in 2022.”
The correct (spoiler) answer: “The Gilded Age,” which was the novel penned by Mark Twain as well as the HBO show of the same name. Barinholtz had the correct response and doubled his score, but he couldn’t catch Kimes, who also got the Final Jeopardy! question to win the tournament.
Kimes won $1 million for L.A.’s SELAH Neighborhood Homeless Coalition, while Barinholtz won $200,000 for the Noonan Syndrome Foundation and Weber won $200,000 for New Directions for Veterans.
Kimes is an NFL analyst, senior writer, podcast host and television contributor for ESPN, who first joined ESPN The Magazine in 2014. She appears on the network’s “NFL Live” and provides football analysis on “SportsCenter,” “First Take” and other programs. Kimes graduated summa cum laude from Yale University with a bachelor of arts in English.
The “Celebrity Jeopardy! All-Stars” tournament featured 21 contestants. Those were the winners of the three seasons of “Celebrity Jeopardy!” — Barinholtz, Lisa Ann Walter and W. Kamau Bell — plus the following: Mark Duplass, Rachel Dratch, Andy Richter, Macaulay Culkin, Cynthia Nixon, Margaret Cho, Ray Romano, Katie Nolan, Mina Kimes, Steven Weber, Sean Gunn, Roy Wood Jr., Patton Oswalt, Robin Thede, Mo Rocca, Timothy Simons, Jackie Tohn and Mira Sorvino. The show aired on ABC with episodes available the next day on Hulu.
“Jeopardy!” is produced by Sony Pictures Television and executive produced by Michael Davies.