NYT Connections Sports #729 Answers for Today, September 22 2026

NYT Connections Sports #729 for September 22 2026 is here! Check out today’s answers and hints.

NYT Connections Sports: Ready? Solve!

There’s a sports-only spinoff version of NYT Connections for people who’d rather argue about nicknames and stat lines than synonyms.

Connections: Sports Edition takes the same grid-and-groups format everyone knows from the original NYT game and fills it entirely with sports trivia including team names, player nicknames, stats, leagues and the occasional pun.

What Does Daze Puzzle Offer You?

On the Daze Puzzle Hub page for NYT Connections Sports, you can find all the colored groups of words in order of difficulty. Click the “Reveal All” button to see all the answers at once, or click the “See Word” button to reveal each answer separately.

There is also a Warm-up zone, which works like a training mode in football simulation games. You can practice the tips below to improve your solving skills.

Tips for Solving Connections: Sports Edition

Lock in your most confident group first. If four words scream “NBA MVPs” or “Olympic swimming strokes” the moment you see them, grab that one before anything else. It clears the board and makes the rest easier to read.

Watch for words that fit more than one sport. A term like “ace” could belong to tennis, baseball, or poker night. If a word feels like it could go two ways, that’s usually a sign the puzzle wants you to slow down.

Save purple for last. It’s almost always the category built on wordplay or an unusually specific connection rather than a shared sport, so it’s easier to spot once the other three groups are out of the way.

Don’t panic on your first mistake. Four wrong guesses give you more breathing room than it might seem.

How to Play

Each puzzle gives you 16 sports-related words or phrases arranged in a 4×4 grid. Your job is to sort them into four hidden groups of four, where each group shares something in common.

Here’s the basic flow:

• Scan the board. Read all 16 tiles before guessing anything. Some words look like they belong in two different groups, and that overlap is intentional.
• Select four tiles you think belong together, then submit.
• Get it right, and the group locks in and disappears from the board, showing its category name.
• Get it wrong and it costs you one of four allowed mistakes. Make four wrong guesses and the round ends.
• Use the shuffle button if the layout is making it hard to spot patterns. Rearranging the tiles can help your eye catch a connection you missed.

There’s no timer, so you can take as long as you want.

The Difficulty Colors

Once you solve a group, it reveals a color, and that color tells you roughly how tricky it was meant to be:

• Yellow: the most straightforward group. Think obvious team groupings or well-known stat categories.
• Green: still fairly approachable, but it asks for a bit more sports knowledge than yellow.
• Blue: this is where it gets genuinely tricky. Expect less obvious links, like athletes who share a first name across totally different sports.
• Purple: the hardest group by design, and often the one built on wordplay rather than straight sports knowledge. A classic purple category might be a set of words that all precede or follow the same term.

You won’t know a tile’s color until after you’ve solved its group, so part of the challenge is guessing which category is the “safe” one and which is the trap.