Dan Dan Noodles Tom Tom is the key phrase for the July 2, 2026 NYT Connections: Sports Edition puzzle for No. 647, and the green group landed on ball marker, flagstick, hole and putter. That set fit the golf theme cleanly, even after at least one golf red herring threw the writer off.
Four answers made up the green group, while the puzzle also organized a NASCAR team set with crew chief, driver, pit crew and spotter. For readers checking their solve, that means the puzzle mixed a straightforward golf cluster with a second sports operations cluster that forced a different kind of sorting.
Columbus and Serie A Clubs
The puzzle also grouped teams in Columbus as Blue Jackets, Buckeyes, Clippers and Crew. That kind of city-based set rewards quick recognition of the local sports map, since the clue is not about one league but about four separate team names sharing one place.
Another set listed Serie A Clubs as Atalanta, Juventus, Lazio and Roma, while WNBA MVPs gathered Catchings, Delle Donne, Fowles and Stewart. Those categories turn the puzzle into a test of sports memory across leagues, not just across nicknames or uniforms.
The Athletic and Sports Edition
Connections: Sports Edition is published by The Athletic and owned by The Times. It does not appear in the NYT Games app, but it can be played for free online and in The Athletic's own app, which gives daily solvers a separate place to find the same puzzle without needing the broader games hub.
That setup matters for anyone checking the July 2, 2026 puzzle after the fact: the answer list is the whole point of the exercise, and No. 647 shows how the game mixes a theme group, a difficulty reset, and a few decoys before the four-color grid locks in.
Golf red herring
The clearest complication in No. 647 was the golf red herring. The theme was found on the green, but one misleading clue was still enough to slow the solve, which is exactly what makes these daily puzzles worth returning to: the answer set looks tidy only after the wrong path is stripped away.
For anyone solving later in the day, the practical move is simple: start with the green group, then use the other named clusters to eliminate lookalikes. That leaves the July 2, 2026 puzzle with one clean takeaway — ball marker, flagstick, hole and putter were the four green-group answers that completed No. 647.
