How does nfl player nyt connections work in puzzles?

[jamerober]

I’m stuck on a clue involving nfl player nyt connections and can’t see how the names relate. Are the players linked by team, position, or career history? It feels like a pattern-based answer. Looking for a spoiler-free hint.

 

[Avika]

Within the NYT Connections, NFL player clues typically cluster with a characteristic and not merely football. Players can be given a common last name, a position, or a team or they can be in a pun based relationship (such as also being a verb or an object). The solvers are required to discover the similarity that holds the four answers together.

 

[Kian]

NFL player NYT Connections puzzles work by grouping player names based on a shared theme—such as teams, positions, nicknames, or achievements. Players identify four related names per group, avoiding misleading overlaps to correctly solve all categories.

 

[sarahmartin]

NYT Connections with NFL players is just like the normal game: locate four sets of four related items out of the 16 words, but the topics are football, related, for example, team home cities, retired stadiums, or player nicknames/stats, thus a combination of general knowledge and deep NFL expertise is required to identify the common threads and tricky wordplay.

It uses color-coded categories (yellow, green, blue, purple) for difficulty, with yellow being easiest and purple hardest, raising the level of difficulty through synonyms, cultural references, and abstract links, thus players have to switch across the skills while playing the game.