Today’s NYT ‘Connections: Sports Edition’ Hints And Answers For Sunday, September 29

Looking for Saturday’s Connections: Sports Edition hints and answers instead? You can find them here:

Happy football day, sports fans! I hope your team wins today. I was spellbound by Cole Palmer’s performance for Chelsea in the other (proper) version of football yesterday. Four goals, and he could have had at least six. Remarkable stuff.

Today’s NYT Connections: Sports Edition hints and answers are coming right up.

How To Play Connections: Sports Edition

Connections: Sports Edition is a free daily New York Times game. You get a new puzzle at midnight every day and you can play on the NYT website. It works just like the regular Connections game, except everything is sports-related.

You’re presented with a grid of 16 words. Your task is to arrange them into four groups of four by figuring out the links between them. The groups could be things like teams in a certain city, athletes who won Olympic gold in a certain discipline or various sports terms linked by a color.

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There’s only one solution for each puzzle, and you’ll need to be careful when it comes to words that might fit into more than one category. You can shuffle the words to perhaps help you see links between them.

Each group is color coded. The yellow group is usually the easiest to figure out, blue and green fall in the middle, and the purple group is usually the most difficult one. The purple group often involves wordplay.

Select four words you think go together and press Submit. If you make a guess and you’re incorrect, you’ll lose a life. If you’re close to having a correct group, you might see a message telling you that you’re one word away from getting it right, but you’ll still need to figure out which one to swap.

If you make four mistakes, it’s game over. Let’s make sure that doesn’t happen with the help of some hints, and, if you’re really struggling, today’s Connections answers. As with Wordle and other similar games, it’s easy to share results with your friends on social media and group chats.

Today’s Connections: Sports Edition Hints

Scroll slowly! Just after the hints for each of today’s Connections: Sports Edition groups, I’ll reveal what the groups are without immediately telling you which words go into them.

Here’s what the grid looks like:

Today’s 16 words and logos are...

• CURVE
• BILL
• LARRY
• JERRY
• LINE
• SINKER
• KNUCKLEBALL
• COWBOY
• RAM
• ROD
• CHANGEUP
• TERRELL
• FASTBALL
• HOOK
• PACKER RANDY

And the hints for today’s groups are:

• Yellow group — types of throws from the mound
• Green group — you’ll need these to land the catch of the day
• Blue group — a member of a pro gridiron team, perhaps
• Purple group — they arguably caught the ball better than anyone

Today’s Connections: Sports Edition Groups

Need some extra help?

Be warned: we’re starting to get into spoiler territory.

Today’s groups are...

• Yellow group — baseball pitches
• Green group — fishing equipment
• Blue group — N.F.L. teams, minus the "S"
• Purple group — first names of all-time leaders in receiving yards

Today’s Connections: Sports Edition Answers?

Spoiler alert! Don’t scroll any further down the page until you’re ready to find out today’s Connections: Sports Edition answers.

This is your final warning!

Today’s Connections: Sports Edition answers are...

• Yellow group — baseball pitches (CHANGEUP, CURVE, FASTBALL, KNUCKLEBALL)
• Green group — fishing equipment (HOOK, LINE, ROD, SINKER)
• Blue group — N.F.L. teams, minus the "S" (BILL, COWBOY, PACKER, RAM)
• Purple group — first names of all-time leaders in receiving yards (JERRY, LARRY, RANDY, TERRELL)

It was nice to get my first perfect game on this version of Connections. Here's how I fared:

🟢🟢🟢🟢

🟡🟡🟡🟡

🔵🔵🔵🔵

🟣🟣🟣🟣

The fishing-related words jumped right out at me. While I don't know much about baseball, I did recognize the types of pitches. From there, it was a matter of separating the team names and people's names.

That’s all there is to it for today’s Connections: Sports Edition clues and answers. Be sure to check my blog for hints and the solution for Monday’s game if you need them.

P.S. Here's my second-favorite goal of all time. Few would dare to try this and even fewer have the skill to pull it off. The fact it was against England was even sweeter. Sure, Zlatan Ibrahimović is brash and arguably arrogant, but man, could he back that confidence up:

This goal was brought up a couple of times on Ibrahimović's recent appearance on Hot Ones. I never imagined I'd see him on that show, but he was a fantastic guest: