The puzzle maker is counting on you to see the obvious connection first, then realize you were wrong.
Each midnight, a new puzzle arrives like a small philosophical test — not of knowledge alone, but of the mind's willingness to look past the obvious. The 593rd edition of Connections: Sports Edition asks its solvers to find hidden kinship among sixteen words that seem, at first glance, to belong to entirely different worlds. Designed by Mark Cooper of The Athletic, the game is a quiet daily ritual that rewards the patient thinker who trusts that meaning, once found, was always there.
- Sixteen words sit on a board like strangers at a party — ROOK could mean a chess piece or a rookie athlete, KING could be royalty or a Padres pitcher, and the puzzle depends entirely on which lens you choose.
- With only four mistakes allowed before the game ends, every guess carries real consequence, turning a casual word game into a small exercise in controlled risk.
- The color-coded difficulty ladder — yellow to purple — signals where the traps are buried, and today's purple category, San Diego Padres players, is the one most likely to catch solvers off guard.
- Stadium anthem artists AC/DC, Darude, Queen, and Survivor form the blue category, a connection that requires solvers to think not about music genres but about the specific cultural ritual of the sports arena.
- The puzzle resets at midnight every night, designed by one editor who must balance the obvious and the sideways — ensuring the game is neither humiliating nor effortless.
Every night at midnight, puzzle No. 593 in the Connections: Sports Edition series quietly appears on The Athletic's platform, rated 2.5 out of 5 in difficulty — enough to make you think, not enough to break you. The premise is simple: sixteen words, four groups of four, each group bound by a hidden thread. You have four mistakes before the game closes its doors.
The words on today's board are designed to mislead. ROOK, KNIGHT, QUEEN, and KING look like chess pieces until you realize the puzzle is pulling them in different directions entirely. FROSH, PROSPECT, ROOK, and TENDERFOOT form the yellow category — terms coaches use for athletes who haven't yet proven themselves. The green group gathers Big 12 college mascots: BEARCAT, BUFFALO, COUGAR, and KNIGHT. Blue belongs to stadium anthem artists — AC/DC, Darude, Queen, and Survivor — songs that have become inseparable from the experience of watching sports in a crowd. And purple, the trickiest tier, names members of the San Diego Padres: Bogaerts, King, Sheets, and Tatis.
The man behind the puzzle is Mark Cooper, a managing editor for college sports at The Athletic, who designs each game by weighing which connections will feel satisfying and which will genuinely surprise. Connections: Sports Edition is The Athletic's first daily puzzle — a small ritual to bring readers back, to give them something to solve before the day's news takes over.
Whether you solved it cleanly or needed a guide, tomorrow's sixteen words are already waiting. The game never truly ends — it simply begins again.
Every day at midnight, a new puzzle appears on The Athletic's platform, waiting for the kind of person who likes to sit with a problem until it clicks into place. Today's version—the 593rd in the series—is rated a 2.5 out of 5 in difficulty, which means it's not going to humiliate you, but it won't hand you the answer either.
Connections: Sports Edition works like this: you get sixteen words scattered across a board, and your job is to sort them into four groups of four. Each group shares something in common—a thread that ties them together in a way that isn't always obvious. You have four mistakes to spend before the game ends. The categories themselves are color-coded by difficulty: yellow is the easiest, then green, then blue, and finally purple, which is where the puzzle makers tend to hide their tricks.
Today's board contains words that, on the surface, seem to belong to different worlds entirely. There's ROOK, KNIGHT, QUEEN, and KING—words that could mean chess pieces, or they could mean something else entirely. There's FROSH, PROSPECT, TENDERFOOT, and one more word that describes someone new to a sport. There are college mascots: BEARCAT, BUFFALO, COUGAR, and another Big 12 school. And then there are names that might belong to musicians or athletes or both: AC/DC, DARUDE, SURVIVOR, and one more.
The yellow category—the straightforward one—groups together terms for young or inexperienced athletes: FROSH, PROSPECT, ROOK, and TENDERFOOT. These are the words coaches use when they're talking about someone who hasn't yet proven themselves. The green category pulls together Big 12 college mascots: BEARCAT, BUFFALO, COUGAR, and KNIGHT. The blue category is where things get interesting: AC/DC, DARUDE, QUEEN, and SURVIVOR are all artists who created iconic stadium anthems—songs that get played at sporting events and stick in your head for years. And the purple category, the trickiest one, contains members of the San Diego Padres: BOGAERTS, KING, SHEETS, and TATIS.
The puzzle was designed by Mark Cooper, who works as a managing editor for college sports at The Athletic and creates each day's game. He's the one who has to think about which words might fool you, which connections are obvious, and which ones require you to think sideways. The game itself is The Athletic's first venture into daily puzzles—a way to keep readers coming back, to give them something to solve before they check the news or scroll through their feeds.
If you solved it without hints, you're in good shape. If you needed help, that's what this guide is for. Tomorrow at midnight, Cooper will have another puzzle ready, another set of sixteen words waiting to be sorted. The game never stops; it just resets.
The Hearth Conversation Another angle on the story
Why does a puzzle like this matter? It's just words on a screen.
Because it's a small thing that asks you to think differently for five or ten minutes. In a world of infinite scroll, that's actually rare.
But what makes this one specifically a sports puzzle?
The words are drawn from sports—athletes, teams, songs that play at games. It's a way of saying: this is for people who care about this world. It's a signal.
Is it hard?
Today's one is medium. A 2.5 out of 5. The yellow category is obvious if you know sports language. The purple one—the Padres players—that's where most people stumble.
Why would that be tricky?
Because KING is a last name, but it's also a chess piece. SHEETS could be bedding. The puzzle maker is counting on you to see the obvious connection first, then realize you were wrong.
So the puzzle is testing whether you can think past your first instinct.
Exactly. That's the whole game.