Meet Ryan Williams, Bama’s 17-year-old football hero. Plus, NFL Sunday Watch Guide

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NFL Watch Guide: It’s time for takes

Four weeks is plenty of time to formulate an NFL mindset. We saw some early season indicators disappear last week, but factoring four games into the take formula makes it a solid assumption. We heard it, and after this week there is still a lot of new insight to be gained:

1 p.m. ET
Vikings at Packers – The most intriguing matchup on a loaded early roster. Minnesota incredibly looked like the best team in the NFL through three games, while Green Bay found a way to win without Jordan Love, thanks in part to an incredible defense. Plus, these fan bases hate each other. Winning for all of us. Television: CBS

4:05 p.m. ET
Commanders at Cardinals – Jayden Daniels was the star last week, but Arizona has been better than we expected this year despite a double start. Does Daniels have a come-down game? Can Kyler Murray flash against a shaky Washington defense? We will learn a lot here.

8:20 p.m. ET
Bills at Ravens – The best game of the week, bar none. Two of the top five QBs in the league are playing in a massive early AFC tournament. If Buffalo wins here, expect the Josh Allen MVP hype to increase.

Two questions and one point of criticism: The puzzle master comes by

We’ve heard from tons of people so far who love the Connections: Sports Edition beta. Hundreds of thousands have already played, and in my opinion – that is, people get annoyed by puzzles – our latest game project was a complete success.

Mark Cooper, whose author appeared on these pages many moons ago, creates these puzzles daily. I called him with a few questions (and a complaint):

Hello Mark. In Yesterday’s mysterypicked out “teams that share names with cars,” including the Broncos, Chargers, Mustangs and Trail Blazers. But how dare you?

Mark: If we’ve reached the complaint stage, we’ve done it! I’m kidding. One of the best parts of working on Connections: Sports Edition was experimentation – a new daily game seems to require that – and it’s fun to see how different concepts have been embraced by players in the first week.

I’m an avid Connections Flagship player, and I particularly like the game boards that group together words that might not otherwise go together – maybe they’re all homonyms, or they can all be followed by the same word to form a phrase. I want to capture the essence of this by finding the similarities between sports terms that we might not always notice. So I think about what words, teams, and player names have commonalities that may be just one step removed from the sport itself. Like car models.

What does your process look like? Take us behind the scenes.

For the most part, I put boards together in one of two ways. To start, I like to come up with a term that acts as a misdirection or pivot – like “Auerbach on Wednesday” or “Auburn on Thursday”. Auerbach fit in with “Red _____,” but was also the fifth plausible option for an NBA coaching group. Auburn is an SEC city, but was also a fifth option for teams called the Tigers. It’s a fun puzzle challenge when one word is the core of the game and once you figure out where to put it, the other words start to fall into place.

Other forums start with an idea for the purple or hard group that I really like. I keep a document of category ideas and try to figure out which ones go together in a fun way – whether that’s through misdirection or just a funny combination of words.

I heard you planned the first few dozen puzzles. How sneaky are you getting?

I’m grateful that we have a fantastic group of internal testers to provide feedback – and perhaps save you from too many tricks. I recently worked on a film that combined NASCAR tracks with Will Ferrell sports movies – with Talladega as the focus – and then shelved it because the difficulty level wasn’t quite right.

But I’m interested in getting involved in more boards that combine sports with pop culture. There’s a lot of potential in sports movies, TV movies, and more, and I hope it’ll be refreshing to mix up these categories occasionally.

I can’t wait to be mad at Mark again. Play today’s Connections: Sports Edition beta here.