Four different schools use the same mascot, scattered across regions
Each day, the New York Times invites sports fans into a quiet contest of pattern recognition, asking them to find the hidden threads binding sixteen words across four worlds — baseball scoreboards, college mascots, professional rosters, and the arcane poetry of curling. Puzzle 569, arriving on April 15th, is less a trivia test than a meditation on how deeply we absorb the languages of the games we love. It reminds us that fandom is not merely loyalty but literacy — a fluency built through years of watching, listening, and paying attention to the small details others let pass.
- Sixteen words sit on the board like strangers at a party, and the player's task is to discover which four secretly belong together — a deceptively simple premise that quickly reveals the edges of one's sports knowledge.
- The difficulty escalates deliberately: stadium abbreviations for baseball teams are forgiving, but curling terminology — bonspiel, end, house, stone — can strand even confident players who have never watched a sheet of ice.
- With only four mistakes allowed, each wrong guess carries real consequence, turning casual wordplay into a tense negotiation between confidence and caution.
- Players shuffle the board, reconsider their assumptions, and lean on lateral thinking — recognizing, for instance, that Clemson, LSU, Memphis, and Detroit share not a conference but a tiger.
- The puzzle resets every morning and invites social sharing, transforming a solitary mental exercise into a daily communal ritual across sports fan communities.
The New York Times, in partnership with The Athletic, has brought its beloved Connections format into the arena of sports with a daily puzzle that launched as Connections: Sports Edition. Puzzle 569 presented sixteen words to be sorted into four groups of four, each group concealing a shared thread — and each tier of difficulty demanding a different kind of fluency.
The easiest category asked players to recognize the three-letter scoreboard abbreviations for four MLB teams: CIN for the Cincinnati Reds, MIL for the Milwaukee Brewers, PIT for the Pittsburgh Pirates, and STL for the St. Louis Cardinals. It is the kind of knowledge that lives in the peripheral vision of anyone who has watched a baseball broadcast. The green category moved to college athletics, grouping four universities — Clemson, Detroit, LSU, and Memphis — by their shared tiger mascot, a connection that rewards either deep familiarity with college sports or a talent for thinking sideways.
The blue tier required current NBA awareness, asking players to identify Luka Doncic, LeBron James, Marcus Smart, and Jarrett Vanderbilt as members of the Los Angeles Lakers. Knowing the superstars is easy; knowing the full roster is something else. The purple category, the hardest, belonged entirely to curling — a sport with its own precise vocabulary. Bonspiel, end, house, and stone are words that mean little outside the sport, making this group a genuine test of specialized knowledge.
The game allows up to four mistakes, resets each morning, and lets players share their results — a design that has turned daily puzzle-solving into something closer to a communal ritual. For those who crack every category, there is the quiet satisfaction of fluency proven. For everyone else, the board resets tomorrow.
The New York Times has extended its popular word-puzzle franchise into sports territory with Connections: Sports Edition, a daily challenge that launched in partnership with The Athletic. On April 15th, puzzle number 569 arrived with 16 words spread across four categories of escalating difficulty, each testing a different corner of sports knowledge.
The game works like its parent puzzle: players must identify the hidden thread connecting four words at a time. Get all four right, and they vanish from the board. Make a wrong guess, and you lose one of four allowed mistakes. The categories range from yellow (simplest) to purple (hardest), color-coded to signal the cognitive leap required. Today's puzzle demanded familiarity with baseball scoreboards, college athletics, professional basketball, and winter sports terminology—a broad enough net to catch casual fans and serious devotees alike.
The yellow category, marked as the easiest entry point, asked players to recognize how Major League Baseball teams appear on stadium scoreboards: the Cincinnati Reds as CIN, the Milwaukee Brewers as MIL, the Pittsburgh Pirates as PIT, and the St. Louis Cardinals as STL. These are the three-letter abbreviations that flash on the electronic displays during games, a detail that separates those who watch baseball regularly from those who merely know the team names.
The green tier shifted to college sports, specifically to schools whose mascots are tigers. Clemson University, the University of Detroit, Louisiana State University, and the University of Memphis all claim the tiger as their symbol. The puzzle required recognizing not just that these institutions exist, but that they share this particular identity—a test of either deep college sports knowledge or the ability to make lateral connections across different athletic programs.
The blue category pulled from the Los Angeles Lakers' roster, asking players to identify four current or recent members: Luka Doncic, LeBron James, Marcus Smart, and Jarrett Vanderbilt. This required up-to-date knowledge of professional basketball, since rosters shift constantly. A player might know James and Doncic as superstars, but recognizing Smart and Vanderbilt as Lakers demanded closer attention to the NBA.
The purple category, the most difficult, ventured into curling—a sport that commands passionate followings in certain regions but remains unfamiliar to many casual sports fans. The four terms were bonspiel (a curling tournament), end (a round of play), house (the target area), and stone (the object thrown). These words carry no obvious connection to one another outside the sport itself, making this category a genuine test of specialized knowledge.
Connections: Sports Edition resets daily, with each new puzzle introducing fresh word combinations and categories. Players can shuffle the board to help spot patterns, and they can share their results on social media—a feature that has made the original Connections a social phenomenon. The game sits at the intersection of word puzzles and sports trivia, demanding both linguistic flexibility and domain expertise. For those who solve it, there's the satisfaction of having cracked a code. For those who don't, there's always tomorrow.
The Hearth Conversation Another angle on the story
Why does a puzzle about sports need its own version? Isn't the original Connections already hard enough?
The sports edition lets you use what you actually know. If you watch basketball or follow college football, suddenly you have an advantage. The original Connections can feel random—this one rewards expertise.
So it's not just harder, it's different in kind?
Exactly. A curling term like "bonspiel" would never appear in the regular game. But here, if you've watched curling or read about it, you can solve it. It's a puzzle that respects your knowledge.
What makes today's puzzle tricky, then?
The green category—the tigers—is the trap. Four different schools use the same mascot, but they're scattered across different athletic levels and regions. You have to know all four, and they don't announce themselves.
And the Lakers players?
That one punishes you if you're not current. Doncic and James are obvious, but Smart and Vanderbilt? You need to follow the team closely. It's not just knowing basketball—it's knowing this season's roster.
Does that feel fair?
It does, actually. The game tells you upfront it's testing sports knowledge. If you're playing, you've signed up for that challenge. The color coding gives you a roadmap—yellow is forgiving, purple is meant to hurt.