The NYT Connections: Sports Edition puzzle for February 25 just dropped, and honestly, it’s a wild mix of difficulty levels. Some groups practically solve themselves, while others will have you scratching your head wondering if you even know what sports are. But that’s kind of the charm with this variant, isn’t it?
The Athletic’s take on the Connections formula keeps things fresh by leaning heavily into sports trivia and wordplay that casual fans might miss entirely. Today’s puzzle is no exception. It features everything from baseball terminology to obscure sports history references that’ll make you feel either brilliant or completely lost depending on where your sports knowledge lands.
When Baseball Slang Becomes a Category
Let’s start with the easiest one. The yellow group is all about hitting a baseball really hard, and the answers are belt, blister, hammer, and tattoo. These are all ways you’d describe absolutely crushing a pitch. Belt is probably the most common, but if you’ve listened to any baseball commentary in the last decade, you’ve heard all four of these terms tossed around. It’s the kind of category that feels obvious once you get it but might trip you up if you’re not deeply into baseball vernacular.
Orange and Black Team Time
The orange difficulty group tackles teams that wear orange and black. Bengals, Flyers, Giants, and Oklahoma State make up this crew. Now here’s where things get tricky because not everyone immediately connects Oklahoma State’s colors to this category. The Bengals and Flyers are lock-ins for most sports fans, but Oklahoma State might feel like an outlier if you’re not following college sports regularly.
Montreal’s Greatest Hits
The blue group digs deep into Montreal sports history with a theme that’s honestly pretty cool. 1976 Olympics, Canadiens, Expos, and Youppi! are all connected to the city. Youppi! is probably the wildcard here since not everyone knows about the Expos mascot or even that Montreal once had a Major League Baseball team. But that’s what makes Connections puzzles so satisfying. They force you to connect things you might know separately but never thought to group together.
The Derby Derby
Finally, the purple group brings home run, Kentucky, Merseyside, and roller as things that come before or after the word “derby.” This one requires some real sports knowledge across multiple disciplines. Kentucky derby gets you the horse racing angle. Roller derby is the skating sport. Home run derby is baseball’s slugging competition. But Merseyside? That’s a deep cut for anyone not following English football closely.
The puzzle keeps you honest. It doesn’t let you just know one thing really well and coast through. You need breadth across different sports, different countries, and different eras. That’s the appeal and the frustration all wrapped into one.
What gets me about these sports-specific puzzles is how they reveal gaps in our knowledge while simultaneously making us feel like we know way more than we actually do. One minute you’re crushing a category about baseball slang, and the next you’re completely stumped by a Montreal reference because you forgot the Expos existed. Sports fandom is weirdly fragmented like that.
