NFL Puzzle – Answer: GEORGIA – By Kenny Young

This puzzle was a cryptographic word search. Luckily there was only a simple substitution cipher involved. There are only two teams that can be used to crack this grid: BUCCANEERS and STEELERS. After locating one of those, converting the known letters will make the rest of the teams come out. The plaintext grid:

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After locating all 31 NFL teams, no solution is apparent and lots of unusual words appear. Professionals? Dodgers? Steamroller? What gives?

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The key is discovering that all NFL teams, including defunct ones, are in the grid. A small amount of license was taken here, considering the Yanks as a duplicate reference to the Yankees, plus a couple of other similar cases. The hardest team to locate was the WWII-influenced 1944 Card-Pitt “Carpets”, mentioned on far fewer Web sites than the 1943 Phil-Pitt “Steagles”. The truly completed grid:

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The unused letters spell out “COLLEGE FROM THIS STATE WON THE WORST ROUT IN HISTORY”. This would be GEORGIA. Georgia Tech beat Cumberland by the astonishing score of 222-0 in 1916.