Did 'Jeopardy!' champion throw final match in 16-game winning streak?

Trivia fans were shocked by a “Jeopardy!” champion’s unexpected loss, but he denies throwing the game in the final match.

Scott Riccardi had been on a 16-game winning streak when he missed the clue in “Final Jeopardy” about “20th Century Names.” Instead, Riccardi admits the clue got the best of him.

"According to one obituary, in 1935 he owned 13 magazines, eight radio stations, two movie companies and $56 million in real estate,” host Ken Jennings read to the contestants.

The answer was William Randolph Hearst, which the other two players got right. That led Jonathan Hugendubler, an adjunct professor from Baltimore, to overtake Riccardi with a big bet and end his victory run.

Fans of the show felt the clue was so easy that Riccardi, who racked up $455,000 over 16 games, should have nailed it easily.

They even speculated that for some reason he threw the game and put a wrong answer, Howard Hughes, instead.

But Riccardi took to the game show’s Reddit page to explain that he simply stumbled.

“My mind unfortunately went straight to Howard Hughes mostly due to overestimating the importance of the movie companies part of the clue,” he wrote in a post on Friday. “Any previous FJs that had come to mind immediately had worked out, so I trusted my initial response on this.”

Riccardi said he studied archived clue examples and had made a “mental note” about Hearst, but couldn’t remember it before taping.

He also admitted, “Also, before I started my prep for the show in earnest, I had found that I was having a hard time properly retaining info on what I found to be a confusing amount of three-named Williams in publishing (William Randolph Hearst, William Lloyd Garrison, and William F. Buckley, to name a few), never circling back to that thought after I got the call to be on the show.”

“So several information near-misses and a poor understanding of the timeline in the clue really piled up to prevent me from getting what I now understand to be a very gettable clue.”

Still, Riccardi had an amazing run on the show and easily secured a spot in the annual “Tournament of Champions” games when those next air.