Today’s Connections: Sports Edition leans hard into wordplay. Two groups are fairly gettable once you latch onto the sport-language, and one category is the kind of “wait, what?” transformation that makes you double-check your letters. If you’re looking for a nudge without fully jumping to the finish, use the hints below first.
Hints
Yellow (easiest): Think of what something does when it’s going the wrong direction—specifically, a kind of movement that suggests a slow slide downward.
Green: This one is built around common terms for running plays in football.
Blue: Four words that are recognizable as sports mascots connected to Oregon—each one pointing to an Oregon-adjacent team identity.
Purple (toughest): Add two letters to each given fragment to make a Major League Baseball team name. The added letters are the whole trick.
Answers
Yellow group: decline, dip, downturn, slump
Green group: counter, dive, draw, sweep
Blue group: Beaver, Duck, Thorn, Timber
Purple group: ange (Angels), dodge (Dodgers), marine (Mariners), range (Rangers)
If you solved it, you probably noticed the puzzle rewarding two different instincts: one for sports-specific vocabulary (football plays, Oregon mascots) and one for pattern matching with letter additions (the MLB transformations). For tricky Connections rounds, a good habit is to test whether each word “fits” as a standalone meaning and whether it could become something else with a small, consistent letter change.
