Occasional Puzzle: Department of NFL Mind Games

I heard you mental midgets like puzzles, despite obviously not ever being able to get to the end of the Candyland board. Lucky for you, I found something interesting while looking for pizzas leftover from NFL meetings in the dumpsters behind the future NFL headquarters (aka the White House). I brought it back through time with me, and perhaps you can decode it for me so that I can raid your fridges while you’re distracted.

It had a front intro page, but there was some leftover chocolate pudding on it, so I just ate the whole thing. I managed to remember the gist of it though: the NFL Mind Games team brought together five groups of NFL-related people, had them all hang out in their groups in the same room, to see if there were common mindsets among them. At the end of the session, they had them write down the first thing that came to their mind at the time. Now, these were all on individual note cards, and they kind of got all jumbled up during the temporal journey, so you’ll have to sort them all back together and figure out if there’s a common theme when it comes to thinking about the NFL.

Notecards:

• Jed York – Crank
• Jake Plummer – Herman’s
• Victor Cruz – Dense
• Jason Whitlock – Paper
• Joe Montana – Pumpkin
• Joe Buck – Pigskin
• Jerry Jones – Mine
• Jason Pierre-Paul – Difficult
• Adam Schefter – QB hit
• Ian Eagle – Bouncing
• Jimmy Haslam – Shut your mouth
• Doug Flutie – Bucket
• Eli Manning – Not Easy
• Chris Mortensen – Santa
• Al Michaels – Brass
• Trent Green – Injury
• Odell Beckham Jr – Impossible
• Mike Tirico – Kicked
• Jim Isray – Graphite
• Kenny Albert – Deflated
• Peter King – Hackie
• Prince Amukamara – Tough
• Dan Marino – Hilton
• Jerry Richardson – Cam
• Mike Florio – Money