Connections Sports Edition #777 Answers, November 9, 2026

Connections: Sports Edition from The Athletic and New York Times (NYT) Games is puzzle #777 on Monday, Nov. 9, 2026. You get two hints per color first. The answers, a Louisiana who’s-who and the traps follow in a spoiler section.

The mistake limit and the rules are on our Connections page.

Monday’s hints, #777, Nov. 9, 2026

Monday’s board is heavy on football nicknames, with a few tiles that are not names at all. Read all sixteen before you commit.

• Yellow hint 1: Each tile is a way to say one scoring play, from a numeral to a nickname.
• Yellow hint 2: One tile is a single digit, and one is a pair of capital letters.
• Green hint 1: All four tiles are teams that share one U.S. state.
• Green hint 2: The four do not all play at the same level of sport.
• Blue hint 1: Four franchises in the same pro league that share a gap in their trophy cases.
• Blue hint 2: None of the four has a championship from the league’s title game.
• Purple hint 1: Each tile needs a word placed in front of it before it means anything.
• Purple hint 2: The missing word is a body of water, and each result is one word.

Some tiles fit two homes. A team nickname can sit in a state group or a trophy group, and a bird can be a team or just a bird. Hold your first guess until one color is certain.

More of Monday’s puzzles: Connections hints and the Monday Night Football preview. Yesterday’s page is Connections: Sports Edition #776. Track your streak on our printable weekly calendar.

Monday’s answers, #777, Nov. 9, 2026 (spoilers)

Stop here if you are still sorting. Beebom and Nerdschalk both print these four groups.

• Yellow, “Touchdown”: 6, TD, Paydirt, Tuddy
• Green, “Louisiana Teams”: Green Wave, Pelicans, Ragin’ Cajuns, Saints
• Blue, “Never Won a Super Bowl”: Bills, Falcons, Texans, Vikings
• Purple, “SEA_____”: Biscuit, Gulls, Hawks, Son

Bills and Vikings, two of the blue tiles, meet tonight: see the Bills at Vikings Monday Night Football story.

Who are the four Louisiana teams?

The green group mixes college and pro. Two tiles are college athletics programs and two are pro teams, one in each of the NBA and the National Football League (NFL).

Tile	Who it is	Level	Official page
Green Wave	Tulane University athletics	College	tulanegreenwave.com
Pelicans	New Orleans Pelicans	National Basketball Association (NBA)	nba.com/pelicans
Ragin’ Cajuns	University of Louisiana at Lafayette athletics	College	ragincajuns.com
Saints	New Orleans Saints	NFL	neworleanssaints.com

The Ragin’ Cajuns site calls itself the “Louisiana Ragin’ Cajuns - Official Athletics Website”, and the University of Louisiana at Lafayette lists the Ragin’ Cajuns under its own Athletics menu. The Tulane site is titled “Tulane University Athletics - Official Athletics Website”.

What do the yellow and purple tiles mean?

Yellow is slang and shorthand for a touchdown. The 6 is the number of points a touchdown is worth under the standard scoring rule.

Each purple tile completes a word after “Sea”:

Tile	Full word
Biscuit	Seabiscuit
Gulls	Seagulls
Hawks	Seahawks
Son	Season

Why Monday’s traps work

Saints, Falcons, Texans, Vikings and Bills are all NFL nicknames, so a quick read puts five or more into one pile. Only some of them belong to the Louisiana group, and the rest share the blue category. Sort by the clue behind each name, not by the league.

Hawks and Gulls both read as birds, and Falcons joins them in the same flock. Hawks also looks like a basketball team name on its own, but here it only works with “Sea” in front. Gulls is the surest purple entry because it has no other home on the board.