The NYT Connections: Sports Edition puzzle for April 8 arrived as No. 562, with a set of clues that asked players to sort four clean groups before the day was over. The puzzle is published by The Athletic, not the NYT Games app, though it can also be played free online.
The yellow group was exercises in singular form: crunch, plank, situp and squat. The green group pointed to sporting jobs that require masks, with catcher, fencer, football player and goaltender. The blue set was Hall of Fame defensive ends: Dent, Peppers, Strahan and Youngblood. The purple group followed the pattern ____ jump, and the answers were broad, high, long and triple.
That separation matters because Connections: Sports Edition lives in a different corner of the Times universe than the standard games offering. The Athletic, a subscription-based sports journalism site owned by The Times, publishes the puzzle on its own app, while players can also reach it free online.
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For solvers, the structure is the point. The puzzle moves from simple fitness words to masked positions, then to a football-heavy Hall of Fame category and finally to the trickiest pattern clue, where the blank comes first and the common ending does the work. On April 8, that meant No. 562 rewarded anyone who saw the sports logic before the wordplay could get in the way.
The question now is not what the puzzle was, but whether players spotted the four themes quickly enough to finish cleanly before moving on to the next day’s board. For anyone opening Connections Nyt on April 8, the answers were all there — and the hardest part was seeing how neatly they fit.
