Hints
Today’s Connections (Sports Edition) leans into teams and naming patterns, with a little extra curveball energy in the purple group. If you’re stuck, don’t force it—start with the cleanest category and let the letter-pattern hints do the work.
Yellow (easiest): Think NFC North, and the kind of player name you’d expect to see associated with the division.
Green: These are college football powerhouses—recognizable programs, each matching one word in the set.
Blue: Same first name across the four answers—so once you lock onto the shared first name, the rest becomes much faster.
Purple (hardest): “____ cap.” The blank is a word that commonly pairs with cap in a sports/celebration-adjacent phrase, and it should help you connect multiple remaining options into one clean group.
Answers
Yellow group — NFC North athlete: Bear, Lion, Packer, Viking.
Green group — ACC athlete: Cavalier, Eagle, Hokie, Mustang.
Blue group — Ja(y)lens in the NBA: Brown, Brunson, Duren, Green.
Purple group — ____ cap: baseball, guardian, rally, salary.
If you solved the puzzle without getting stuck in purple: great job—this is one of those Connections sets where everything is findable once you notice the “same first name” mechanics (blue) and then trust the puzzle’s phrasing trick for the final group (“____ cap”).
