Grid: untimed; Meta: 5 minutes
Matt Gaffney’s Wall Street Journal contest crossword, “Team-Building Exercise” — Conrad’s writeup.
This week’s contest answer is what some NFL players are. There were four long theme entries, each containing a word that became an NFL team player after switching one letter:
WSJ Contest – 09.22.24
- RA[M] -> RA(N)ITBACK: Didn’t make a fair catch
- [V]IKING -> (H)IKINGTHEBALL: Center’s job
- [P]ACKER -> LEADING(S)ACKER: Most feared member of the defense
- [S]AINT -> FACE(P)AINT: Antiglare application for gridiron players
The swapped letters spell our contest solution MVPS. I was thrown off by (H)IKINGTHE(B)ALL, since that leads to both VIKING and BILL. I spent some time looking at BACK, LEADING, and FACE, but didn’t match them to a team. And MVPS is a strong answer. I may have made a mistake or may be missing something: solvers please share your thoughts.
Oh my gosh, the number of things I tried that got nowhere… It always looks so easy in retrospect!
+1
I believe 57D should be AMC and 60A should be MCAT.
Agree.
Fixed, thanks!
I don’t care at all about football, so I didn’t spend a lot of time on this one.
I was looking at the right answers, but I wasn’t looking for the right thing. For some reason, the “switch a letter and come up with a new word” trick never occurs to me.
I spent a little time with “There’s no ‘I’ in team!” because all four theme answers have the letter I. Obviously, that went nowhere.
When I saw the NFL theme I assumed I would have no chance. But almost immediately after finishing the grid I noticed King in Hiking and thought maybe that is a team. And Back made me think of Razorbacks. This led me to look up all the NFL teams, something I would not usually do but I wanted to be sure if such a team existed (and we had a similar baseball theme not too long ago that really stumped me). I then saw Viking, not King, and Saint rather than Titan, and Packer. I had three of them, Ram took a bit longer. Got MVPs. All in all it was a fairly easy one, and a fair one, even if I had to cheat a bit (in my rule book) by googling.
Side note: I tried using the word Sacker in LetterBoxed the other day and was surprised it was not accepted.
Was the BALL / BILL thing a mistake or did it have some hidden meaning? Anybody know?