The instructions to this week’s meta say that we are looking for an NFL team. There are 32 of them in all, so if you were to randomly guess, you’d have no worse than a one-in-32 chance of being correct. But rather than leave it to chance, let’s see if it we can narrow it down to one correct choice. This meta involves a few steps, so let’s take them one at a time.
There are seven obvious theme answers which have two sets of parenthetical numbers in their clues:
- 23A: [Revolver inventor (9) (4)] is SAMUEL COLT.
- 34A: [Student newspaper at a Southern university (4) (5)] is THE DAILY TEXAN.
- 44A: [Cry of encouragement at a rodeo (4) (5)] is RIDE ‘EM COWBOY.
- 71A: [Francis of Assisi or Catherine of Siena, to Italy (5-2-3) (8)] is PATRON SAINT.
- 98A: [Device that powers up an Android (9,4) (7)] is PHONE CHARGER.
- 106A: [Amphibious aircraft that sounds like a vacation spot for Blackbeard’s crew (6,4) (4)] is LAKE BUCCANEER.
- 126A: [“Iron Chef America” host (6) (4)] is ALTON BROWN.
Since the NFL is on your mind, the first thing to notice is that each of these answers end with a member of an NFL team: COLT, TEXAN, COWBOY, SAINT, CHARGER, BUCCANEER, and BROWN.
But what’s next? A common thing to try here might be to list out the cities in which these NFL teams are based in (like you needed to do in a previous NFL meta from 2019), but that’s a dead end this time. The parenthetical numbers aren’t exactly helpful right now either; taking the letters in the answers indicated by those numbers produces gibberish.
There’s a key hint hiding elsewhere in the puzzle, at the Omega Across (the last Across answer in the grid). 135A: [Picture designed for an NFL team, say] is LOGO. That clue refers to the NFL and it’s a direct callback to the title “Team Picture,” so it can’t be a coincidence. Step 2 should hopefully be clear: Look at the logos for those seven teams above. Click the links below to view them:
Los Angeles Chargers logo
Tampa Bay Buccaneers logo
We know these seven logos are going to be important, but what information do you need from them? This is where the first set of parenthetical numbers comes in. The clues for SAMUEL COLT (9), THE DAILY TEXAN (4), and RIDE ‘EM COWBOY (4) each have one digit in their first parenthetical number, but the clue for PATRON SAINT has an unusual (5-2-3) enumeration. The clues for PHONE CHARGER (9,4) and LAKE BUCCANEER (6,4) each have two numbers separated by a comma. What could this mean?
If you look at the logos, write down what you see, and you may notice that the each logo can be described by a word or phrase with the same number of letters in the first parenthetical enumeration. In fact, each of these words or phrases can be found in the description of the respective logos in those SportsLogos.net links above:
- COLT (9) → HORSESHOE
- TEXAN (4) → BULL
- COWBOY (4) → STAR
- SAINT (5-2-3) → FLEUR-DE-LIS
- CHARGER (9,4) → LIGHTNING BOLT
- BUCCANEER (6,4) → PIRATE FLAG
- BROWN (6) → HELMET
Surely now we can just take the letters of those logo descriptions indicated by the second set of parenthetical numbers, right? Well, it’s not that simple. The second parenthetical number for THE DAILY TEXAN is (5). Since we have the four-letter BULL as our logo description, we can’t take a fifth letter from that. The same issue arises with the second enumeration for RIDE ‘EM COWBOY (5), with the logo described as the four-letter STAR.
The second parenthetical numbers work similarly to the first ones — they refer to word length. For each second parenthetical number, you need to find an answer in the grid with that word length and whose clue can be a clue for the logo description:
- HORSESHOE (4) → 1A: [Item tossed at a stake] → RING
- BULL (5) → 21A: [Beast with horns] → ELAND
- STAR (5) → 37D: [Night sight] → DREAM
- FLEUR-DE-LIS (8) → 57A: [Symbol historically associated with the French monarchy] → BASTILLE
- LIGHTNING BOLT (7) → 69A: [Flash] → INSTANT
- PIRATE FLAG (4) → 76D: [Where you might see a skull] → RUIN
- HELMET (4) → 132A: [Protective cover at a stadium] → DOME
If you’ve made it this far, the last step should hopefully be clear. Take the first letters of those key answers (RING, ELAND, DREAM, BASTILLE, INSTANT, RUIN, DOME) and you spell out RED BIRD. That describes the logo of the meta answer for this puzzle, the ARIZONA CARDINALS.
(Note: Yes, I’m aware that the Atlanta Falcons logo has red streaks in it, but I consider that primarily a black bird. The Cardinals logo is a more definitive answer for the logo description RED BIRD.)
When I first got the idea for this puzzle, I didn’t set out to make it an all-NFL logo hunt for Super Bowl Sunday. Instead I’d wanted to use logos from several different professional sports leagues, but there were a few problems with that. First, I needed logos that were easy to describe in familiar phrases, so if it was a fairly complex design with a lot going on (like, say, the Boston Celtics logo), it would be hard to know exactly which phrase you’d have to extract from it. Second, these phrases had to be different from the team names themselves — so something like BULL to describe the Chicago Bulls logo or DOLPHIN to describe the Miami Dolphins logo wouldn’t work, since they would just yield the same word. And third, even if you got all the steps, it would be a much more exhausting search to look through the logos of four or five sports leagues to find the final meta answer, where sticking with just one league would make it a simpler, more focused hunt. Fortunately there were just enough NFL logos that could satisfy all the criteria that I needed for the meta that I didn’t need to rely on other leagues.
That was a lot, so here’s the TL; DR recap of how to solve the meta:
- Step 1: Find the seven NFL team members at the ends of the theme answers.
- Step 2: Look at the logos of those seven teams.
- Step 3: Describe each logo using a word or phrase that matches the enumeration of the theme clues’ first parenthetical number(s).
- Step 4: Find a key answer in the grid matching the length of the second parenthetical number and whose clue matches the logo description.
- Step 5: Take the first letters of the seven key answers to spell RED BIRD, which hints at the logo of the ARIZONA CARDINALS.
Strangely enough, even though ARIZONA CARDINALS is the correct meta answer, RED BIRD also kind of separately hints at both teams in Super Bowl LVII: The Chiefs with their red uniforms and the Eagles with their bird logo. What, you think this was all just a lucky coincidence and not something I’ve been planning all along??? I’m gonna buy a lottery ticket before the psychic powers wear off!
Enjoy the big game if you’re watching it.
