The Sunday edition of NYT Connections Sports Edition arrives with puzzle #587, and today's grid is a masterclass in sports history, coaching trivia, and sneaky college team name wordplay. If you know your NFL sideline leaders and your baseball curses, you're already ahead of the curve.
What Makes Connections Sports Edition Tick
For newcomers, NYT Connections Sports Edition presents 16 sports-themed words that must be sorted into four thematic groups of four. The twist?
You're limited to four mistakes, and the color-coded difficulty system (yellow being easiest, purple being trickiest) means surface-level connections often mislead.
Connections Sports Edition brings the same addictive puzzle format to the world of athletics, featuring athletes, teams, sports terminology, and legendary moments. The game's genius lies in its red herrings, words that could fit multiple sports categories but belong in only one.
Today's Grid at a Glance
Here are the 16 words staring back at you in puzzle #587:
STRONG | CORN | BOIL | BILLY GOAT
BAMBINO | COEN | FIT | HAWK
REID | ATHLETIC | RYANS | AGILE
SI COVER | BUCK | MADDEN | GLENN
A seemingly random collection that somehow connects into four perfect categories.
Strategic Hints (No Spoilers Yet)
Yellow Category Nudge: Think about the words you'd use to describe an elite athlete's physical condition.
Green Category Clue: These four phrases are infamous in sports lore for allegedly holding teams back from championships.
Blue Category Hint: These are the guys pacing the sidelines with headsets and play sheets on game day.
Purple Category Teaser: Look at these as fragments, the first pieces of something much bigger on the college sports map.
The Full Solutions
Last chance to solve independently: answers below
---
---
---
---
---
Yellow (In Good Shape): AGILE, ATHLETIC, FIT, STRONG
These are four adjectives that describe an athlete who's in peak physical condition. No tricks here, this is the puzzle's warmup lap.
Green (Famous Sports "Curses"): BAMBINO, BILLY GOAT, MADDEN, SI COVER
The Curse of the Bambino haunted the Red Sox for 86 years, the Billy Goat Curse plagued the Cubs for 71 years, the Madden Curse struck athletes who appeared on the video game cover, and the SI Cover Jinx is the supposed bad luck that follows a Sports Illustrated cover feature. Four of the most talked-about supernatural forces in sports history.
Blue (Current NFL Head Coaches): COEN, GLENN, REID, RYANS
Liam Coen (Jaguars), Aaron Glenn (Jets), Andy Reid (Chiefs), and DeMeco Ryans (Texans) are all active NFL head coaches. If you didn't catch Coen and Glenn as first-name-only entries, this category played hard to get.
Purple (Starts of Big Ten Team Names): BOIL, BUCK, CORN, HAWK
These are the first parts of Big Ten school names: Boil (Purdue Boilermakers), Buck (Ohio State Buckeyes), Corn (Nebraska Cornhuskers), and Hawk (Iowa Hawkeyes). A sneaky purple that punts on full team names and makes you work for the connection.
The Verdict
Puzzle #587 registers as moderate difficulty with a sting in the tail. Yellow falls quickly for anyone who recognizes the fitness descriptors, while green requires deeper sports history knowledge.
Blue separates the true NFL fans from casual viewers, you need to know which coaches are currently running teams. Purple, predictably, is the streak-ender, requiring serious lateral thinking about Big Ten nomenclature.
The real trap? BUCK and HAWK look like they could be animals forming a wildlife category, and STRONG might tempt solvers into a "strength" grouping with the curse names. Don't bite on the obvious, the connections run deeper than surface reading.
Reset and Repeat
Tomorrow's puzzle drops at midnight in your timezone. Until then, reflect on today's performance: did the NFL coaching names trip you up, or were the Big Ten word fragments the real headache?
The beauty lies not in perfection but in training your brain to spot these hidden sports connections.
For now, puzzle #587 is solved. See you at midnight for round #588.
