The New York Times has a puzzle problem, and it’s a good one. After nailing it with Wordle and Connections, the Gray Lady handed off a sports-specific version to The Athletic, its subscription sports journalism arm. The result is a puzzle that feels less like a casual diversion and more like a gauntlet thrown down by someone who actually knows their stuff.
Connections: Sports Edition launched in beta and has since become a genuine fixture for sports nerds everywhere. The format mirrors the original Connections puzzle, where you sort 16 words into four groups of four based on a hidden theme. Sounds simple. It’s not, especially when your puzzle knowledge relies on deep cuts from obscure sports trivia.
When Purple Categories Attack
Today’s puzzle, No. 604 from May 20, demonstrates exactly why this version works so well. The four categories ranged from straightforward to absolutely unhinged. The yellow group (easiest) asked you to identify actions on a field goal attempt: block, hold, kick, and snap. Anyone who’s watched a football game could nail that one.
From there, it escalated. The green group required knowledge of U.S. Olympic host cities, pulling answers like Salt Lake City and St. Louis from your mental sports history file. The blue group dove into triple-A baseball territory with IronPigs and Jumbo Shrimp, which is either your wheelhouse or complete gibberish depending on how closely you follow minor league baseball.
Then came the purple category, where things got genuinely weird. The theme was “ends in an NFL QB,” and the answers lurked inside other words like hidden Easter eggs. Clove contains Jordan Love. Fallen contains Josh Allen. Phoenix contains Bo Nix. Squidward contains Cam Ward. Yes, Squidward from SpongeBob SquarePants was a legitimate Connections answer. That’s the kind of absurdity that makes this puzzle special.
Why This Actually Works
The brilliance here is that Connections: Sports Edition isn’t trying to be accessible to everyone. It’s built for people with specific pockets of expertise. Your Formula 1 obsession, your encyclopedic knowledge of WNBA history, your weird ability to name every Premier League team nickname from memory? All of it suddenly matters.
That’s wildly different from the regular Connections puzzle, which aims for broader cultural knowledge. This version embraces niche expertise as a feature, not a bug. One person demolishes anything about Minnesota teams while stumbling through Formula 1 questions. Another person aces hockey trivia but blanks on baseball. The puzzle rewards deep knowledge in specific domains rather than penalizing you for not knowing everything.
Looking back at some of the toughest categories from The Athletic’s archives reveals just how committed this puzzle is to its own weirdness. A category about Serie A clubs pulled Atalanta, Juventus, Lazio, and Roma. Unless you follow Italian soccer closely, you’re essentially guessing. Similarly, a WNBA MVP grouping with Catchings, Delle Donne, Fowles, and Stewart requires actual familiarity with women’s basketball history, not just casual awareness.
Then there’s the Premier League team nicknames category, where only the Bees are immediately obvious to casual soccer fans. Cherries, Foxes, and Hammers? That’s knowledge you earn by actually paying attention to the sport over time.
The Homophones Problem
The homophones of NBA player names category might be the most diabolical yet. Barns sounds like Barnes. Connect sounds like Kenneth. Heart sounds like Hertz (or Hart). Hero sounds like Herro. This isn’t trivia. This is a linguistic puzzle layered on top of sports knowledge, which makes it simultaneously clever and infuriating in the best way.
It’s the kind of category that makes you want to throw your phone across the room and then immediately pick it back up to try again. That frustration is actually the point. Connections thrives on that feeling of “wait, how am I supposed to know that?” followed by the satisfaction of figuring it out.
Who Is This For?
The Athletic’s choice to publish Connections: Sports Edition outside the main NYT Games app says something important about market segmentation. They’re not competing directly with the Times’ daily puzzle. They’re creating something parallel, available through The Athletic’s own app or free online, that serves a different audience entirely.
This approach works because sports fans and casual puzzle solvers aren’t always the same people. Someone who spends three hours analyzing draft mechanics might take ten minutes on a regular Connections puzzle. But hand them a category about triple-A baseball teams, and suddenly they’re engaged in a way that generic trivia never could be.
The puzzle also sidesteps the accessibility complaint that sometimes haunts regular Connections, where knowledge of obscure pop culture references or niche terminology can feel gatekeeping. Instead, it leans into gatekeeping deliberately, celebrating the fact that deep sports knowledge creates its own community.
What Makes It Stick
The consistency of difficulty across Connections: Sports Edition categories is oddly satisfying. You never quite know if you’re going to get demolished by a question about Serbian tennis players or if you’ll breeze through a category about football field positions. That unpredictability is part of what keeps people coming back.
It also helps that The Athletic clearly understands sports fan psychology. They know that people who care about sports trivia don’t just want easier versions of existing puzzles. They want puzzles that reward the hours they’ve spent watching games, reading stats, and arguing on the internet about coaching decisions. This puzzle delivers exactly that.
The question now is whether this sports-specific model could extend to other verticals. Technology enthusiasts probably have their own obscure knowledge domains that could support a similarly brutal puzzle. Business professionals could navigate a Connections variant that pulls from corporate history or famous CEOs. Video game enthusiasts could dissect gaming references that would baffle everyone else.
For now, Connections: Sports Edition stands alone as proof that the puzzle format is flexible enough to serve multiple audiences with different expertise areas. It’s not dumbing down the game or making it easier. It’s just redirecting the difficulty toward different kinds of knowledge.
That’s the real innovation here: recognizing that people don’t just want puzzles. They want puzzles that speak to who they are and what they actually know. For sports fans, this one absolutely delivers.
