For 345 days (and counting), Connections: Sports Edition has aimed to test sports fans’ wordplay and trivia skills through a carefully crafted puzzle.
With the 2025 NFL season kicking off this month, we’re going a bit bigger.
Introducing Connections: Sports Edition — NFL team-themed edition. The Athletic’s deep roster of NFL reporters and I worked together to produce a team-themed Connections: Sports Edition game on all 32 NFL franchises. Those games are available to play below, and they’re separate from the daily game — meaning they’re available all month.
Test your knowledge of your team, and the rest of the league, all month long. Our NFL writers contributed a mix of current and historic ideas, adding bits of team trivia to every game.
Here’s how to play: Each game board features 16 clues, and the objective is to find four groups of four items that share a commonality. The categories range from straightforward to tricky.
Watch out for words that seem to belong to multiple categories; those are intentional traps! Success is finding the correct solution without making four mistakes.
Feeling up for it? When you’re done solving your team’s puzzle, enter our contest and you could be selected to help design a personal Connections: Sports Edition puzzle to be released later this season.
AFC East
AFC South
AFC North
AFC West
NFC East
NFC South
NFC North
NFC West
(Illustration: John Bradford / The Athletic)
Sep 3, 2025
Connections: Sports Edition
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