New York Times, Thursday, May 21, 2020

This puzzle goes out to my dad, who celebrated his 63rd birthday yesterday, and to my good friend and former partner, who is celebrating his 26th birthday today. He actually gave me the seed entry for my very first puzzle published in the Times—and still asks for a cut of the earnings. Happy birthdays, Dad and David!

I also had to laugh when Jeff showed me his collaboration with Tracy Gray back in 2017, which has a nearly identical theme. I hadn't seen that puzzle before, so I appreciate the Times team taking mine on. I hope solvers still enjoy it.

When Tracy Gray and I did ours, I got so many emails from confused solvers. "There's a serious error. It's the PINK PANTHER SHOW, not the WHITE PANTHER SHOW. Also, I didn't know the song RED CADILLAC, so the puzzle was stupid. You're stupid, too."

Those were the kind ones.

Even knowing exactly what was going on today, I got stuck like a duck in the lower right corner. Although I'm an NFL fan, I don't pay attention to college football, so it took me every cross to figure out YELLOW BOWL.

And then I stared.

And stared.

And stared.

RED and YELLOW make … brown? Does Brown University have an annual rival game?

… purple? For all the bruises football players amass?

… gray? Surely that's the Army game?

Ha ha ha, I'm not that green of a sports fan! Of course it's the Orange Bowl! (At least according to Wikipedia. Except that now, some wikitroll is going to change the entry to the Purple Bowl.)

Will usually frowns heavily on puzzles where the circled letters are exactly the same. Once you figure out the first two sets, you can simply fill in the rest. Boooring! Today is a big exception, though, since without the REDs being circled, it'd be so confusing that it wouldn't just be colors that were bleeding, Andrew and Will's ears leaking blood from all the vitriol.

The revealer didn't make sense to me at first since it's not a RED CROSS as much as a red mixing that causes the color shift. I eventually got that RED CROSS more simply referred to the word RED mixing things up in the CROSSing, but it didn't generate a sharp a-ha moment.

I enjoyed the solve, as well as seeing another constructor's take on the concept. I especially liked feeling outrage that all circles absolutely may not contain repeated letter strings, then the subsequent sheepishness of realizing that it was for an important reason.