Connections: Sports Edition #774, Nov. 6, 2026: Two Hints per Group, Then the Answers

Friday’s Connections: Sports Edition from The Athletic and New York Times (NYT) Games is puzzle #774, for Nov. 6, 2026. Two hints per group come first, then the answers and a roster check in a spoiler section.

Four mistakes are allowed. The rules are on our Connections page.

Friday’s hints, #774, Nov. 6, 2026

Friday’s board is a mix of first names, surnames and short everyday words. Several tiles can be read two ways.

• Yellow hint 1: Each tile names an activity or a use for something worn on the legs.
• Yellow hint 2: One of the four is also the name of a sport, which is the decoy.
• Green hint 1: Four first names or nicknames of men who all play the same position.
• Green hint 2: All four play in the same conference of the National Football League (NFL).
• Blue hint 1: Four surnames or short names of players who all play the same sport.
• Blue hint 2: All four play in the same league, and two of them are teammates.
• Purple hint 1: Each tile completes the same two-word sports term, with the blank first.
• Purple hint 2: One of the four is something you breathe.

Do not lock in a group on three tiles that look alike. A tile that names a sport is a trap on this board, and so is a short word that could be a name.

More of Friday’s puzzles: Connections hints and Wordle hint. Thursday’s page is still up: Connections: Sports Edition #773. Log your streak on our printable weekly calendar.

Friday’s answers, #774, Nov. 6, 2026 (spoilers)

Stop here if you are still sorting Friday’s tiles. Beebom and Nerdschalk both list these four groups. The green group is about quarterbacks in the National Football Conference (NFC), and the blue group is about Major League Soccer (MLS) players.

• Yellow, Types of Shorts: Basketball, Bike, Compression, Gym
• Green, NFC QBs, Familiarly: Baker, Dak, Jordan, Kyler
• Blue, MLS Stars: De Paul, Lewandowski, Messi, Son
• Purple, ___ Hockey: Air, Field, Floor, Ice

Who is on Friday’s board? A roster check for Nov. 6, 2026

Here is where each of the eight players is listed today, from team and league pages.

Tile	Player	Position	Club
Baker	Baker Mayfield	Quarterback	Tampa Bay Buccaneers
Dak	Dak Prescott	Quarterback	Dallas Cowboys
Jordan	Jordan Love	Quarterback	Green Bay Packers
Kyler	Kyler Murray	Quarterback	Minnesota Vikings (NFL.com)
Messi	Lionel Messi	Forward	Inter Miami CF
De Paul	Rodrigo De Paul	Midfielder	Inter Miami CF
Son	Son Heung-min	Forward	Los Angeles Football Club (LAFC)
Lewandowski	Robert Lewandowski	Forward	Chicago Fire FC

The other eight tiles are plain words: four kinds of shorts and four kinds of hockey.

Kyler is the entry other pages get wrong. The Arizona Cardinals released Murray on March 11, 2026, and NFL.com now lists him with the Minnesota Vikings. Pages that still call him a Cardinals quarterback are out of date. The puzzle only needs the first name, so the move does not change the solve.

Why Friday’s traps work

Basketball is a sport as well as a kind of shorts. A tile that names a sport pulls toward the hockey group, so it is easy to misplace.

Field looks like a sport word in its own right, and in the hockey group it is one of four types. Air is the odd one: it is not a surface, yet it sits with the rest.

The names are the second trap. Son and Jordan are short enough to read as ordinary words, and Dak and Baker could pass for any first name. Only one of those four belongs to the soccer group, and the other three go with the football players. Messi and De Paul share a club, which makes a tidy pair, but a pair is only two tiles of four.