Count Off Into Teams

Outstanding puzzle! Happy New Year!

Fun puzzle Will--great to have you back on Sundays

A classic meta that was fun to decode!

Nice one! I was quite stumped with my word squares until I thought to check the clues.

My WAG was Bowl Games. Close. Great puzzle. Thanks Will.

Nice one! BTW, I did try PAGEANT first. Thanks and HNY!

Nice! Too bad my school’s team (Michigan Wolverines) lost, but want to know a secret? I don’t really give a hoot. Fun puzzle!

Well done. It was challenging, but not impossible, as evidenced by the fact I solved it.

What a clever construction...

Wow! Just amazing! Throw that constructor an Oceanic taco ingredient!

Thanks & Happy New Year, Will!

Great puzzle, Will - took me a while but I finally got it!

Quite the tour de force!

thanks for the nudges. at least it wasn't "Pageants"

Impressive construction and two ah-ha moments make for a great first puzzle of the year!

That took a lot of thinking and some hints. Very challenging but fun!

Thanks, Will! Welcome back!

Very clever and nice construction! I need to be better at noticing when clues are forcing the first letter to be something...

Well I can no longer call you a Muggle because only a wizard could make that all come together. I tried everything after I got the 16 words, but I had never put them in "blocks". Since I had used EXCEL and put the long words across the top and then went down the columns to enter the "counted off" letter I never had them lined up together but rather in a stair-step fashion so when I tried using the different letters my order was never correct. I needed Whimsy to hit me in the head with a brick. This has my vote for an ORCA award!

It took a long time with my having to correct some entries in my 4x4 grid of clue first letters until I finally came up[ with a meaningful phrase. But certainly not as long as it must have taken you to come up with this remarkable construction. Quite a tour de force.

Very impressive. It was a lot of work to solve, but fun. It must have been even more to create.

Nice one.

I think it's safe to say we are all bowled over by this construction. (that's my one and only pun for the year. Got it out of the way early.)

Such a cool puzzle to kick off 2023, Will! And good thinking to run with this theme now while the college football playoffs have just four teams and not 12 (wink).

Wow. Amazing puzzle. Early contender for Meta of the Year. The cleanliness and compactness of the grid while pulling this off is simply remarkable.

My journey: Judging by the title, "Bowl Games" was gonna be my wild guess so maybe I would have gotten partial credit somehow. But I finally did something I can never bring myself to while solving puzzles, and that's writing everything that comes to my mind down. After trying to break down Printer Paper into 3-letter words to no avail, I did get lucky with Carbo Loading and once I rearranged the words I got out of it, voila. I then for a while tried to create some random words from the remaining 24 3-letter words (not recommended), then eliminated them to 8 thinking "oh maybe the missing symmetrical pairs are a key" only then to realize "oh you stupid goof just look at the clues!"

Again, wow.

I just listened to podcast episode 6 where Will described the metanism and had to type in the answer just to come back to reality. That is insane! Right now it seems like this level of mechanism will be forever beyond my capacity, but at one point I couldn't solve a Thursday NYT. So I'm going to keep trying!