LAST WEEK’S RESULTS:

Football season is upon us, so last week’s meta asked for an NFL team missing from the grid. The four theme entries were:

17-a [Lucky U?] = HORSESHOE
11-d [“Sesame Street” “sponsor,” some days] = THE LETTER G
64-a [Bolts into the ground] = LIGHTNING
30-d [It’s on many French menus] = FLEUR-DE-LIS

“Head Games” and football must mean helmets, and each of these images appears on an NFL team’s helmet: the Baltimore Indianapolis COLTS (62-a) use the horseshoe, the Green Bay PACKERS (25-d) get THE LETTER G, and the New Orleans SAINTS (9-d) have their iconic FLEUR-DE-LIS. What team is missing? The unused theme entry is LIGHTNING, which appears on the helmet of the SAN DIEGO CHARGERS, making them our contest answer.

This week’s winner, whose name was chosen at random from the 330 correct entries received, is Mark Schulman of Santa Monica, Calif. In addition to a MGWCC pen, pencil and notepad set (with the new URL!), Mark will also receive a signed copy of Peter Gordon’s new book Sizzlingly Hard Fireball Crosswords. Winners for the rest of the month with receive the same.

TO HELMET AND BACK:

I had to completely redo last week’s helmet meta at the last minute. My original theme entries were FLEUR-DE-LIS, HORSESHOE, LIGHTNING and JOLLY ROGER, for whom I’d hidden the words SAINTS, COLTS and RAIDERS in the grid (as it was in the final product, CHARGERS was the meta answer). But while test-solving, Amy Reynaldo pointed out a spectacular piece of bad luck for me: there are not one, but two NFL teams with a JOLLY ROGER on their helmet! Check out the Oakland Raiders, who I’d planned on, but then also the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, whom I hadn’t:

As you can see, the Bucs’ helmet is even more identifiable as a Jolly Roger than my intended Raiders’ since it features the outline of a flag on it. What are the chances? And there was no quick fix available — replacing RAIDERS with BUCS, for example, doesn’t work because BUCS isn’t easily cluable without referring to the team itself — so I had to do the puzzle over from scratch. Wah!

GLITCHES GET STITCHES:

A few hiccups were expected in the transfer from Blogger to WordPress, and indeed they showed up. Webmaster Dave Sullivan and site designer Dan Easley are on the case, however, addressing the following issues:

1) About 20 solvers who entered last week were left off the leaderboard due to a technical glitch that has since been fixed. I think I’ve heard from everyone this happened to, and Dave has entered those we’ve heard from manually onto the leaderboard. But if you submitted an answer last week and didn’t show up on the leaderboard, please e-mail me about it this week so we can be sure to put you on there. Note that you’re *not* obligated to be on the leaderboard; if you don’t want to be, simply leave the nickname space blank.

2) Several solvers mentioned not being able to find the submission form on the iPad version. This has been fixed and the submission form should be on the left sidebar now.

THIS WEEK’S INSTRUCTIONS:

This week’s contest answer is a currency (hint: it’s not the one in the clue to 60-across). Submit your answer in the form on the left sidebar by Tuesday at noon ET. Note: the submissions form disappears from the site promptly at noon on Tuesday.

To print the puzzle out, click on the image below and hit “print” on your browser. To solve using Across Lite either solve on the applet below or download the free software here, then join the Google Group (1,862 members now!) here.

Solve well, and be not led astray by words intended to deceive.