NFL Connections

NFL Connections groups sixteen players by facts from their football careers. Jersey numbers are a frequent link, alongside colleges, positions, draft classes and franchises. Watch the distinction between the team that drafted a player and the teams he played for: both can supply a category, but they do not give you the same four names.

Regularly, and the draft is the source of the board’s best trap. "Drafted by" and "played for" are two different groups built from two different facts, so a quarterback taken by one franchise and remembered at another can sit in either — and only one of them is the group on the board that day. Draft class is its own category too: four men who heard their names in the same year, from four different teams.

They do, as their own group: four professionals who came through the same program. It rewards the fan who followed Saturdays as well as Sundays, and it is the group most often solved last by someone who only watches the pro game.

More than on any other board in the family: four running backs, four kickers, four wide receivers. A football position tells you nothing about era, team or number, so the group sits at an angle to everything around it — and the kicker group is the one people remember, because four specialists among sixteen names is a shape you stop expecting.

The ones voted at the time and countable afterwards — the league’s Most Valuable Player, and repeat Pro Bowl selection at a stated threshold. An honour group is always a matter of record, never a judgement about who belonged, so it can be checked line by line once the board is over.

No, and a board that looks like it is probably about to catch you. The rotation reaches back across the decades of the professional football record and frequently groups by the decade a player debuted, which is why a recent star can sit beside someone who retired long before them. A name you do not recognise is usually the clue that you are looking at an era group rather than a bad one.

Ten more: golf, the NBA, cricket, the WNBA, the AFL, the NHL, soccer, MLB, college basketball and college football. More NFL games: NFL Wordle, NFL Grid, Build an NFL Player, NFL Career Simulator and NFL Team Wheel. NFL Trivia Quiz asks three questions a day. Guess the NFL Team asks for the city of one era’s players. The NFL Ball Knowledge Dive asks for one right name, and the less obvious it is, the more it scores.