The October Sports Quiz: Eight Questions on Playoffs and Upsets

The first weekend of October is when the sports calendars collide, and this year the pileup was especially rich. Baseball's wild-card round is finished and the division series start Saturday, with the Yankees visiting the Rays, the White Sox visiting the Guardians, and the Padres visiting the Brewers. The NFL delivered a Thursday night classic in Cleveland. The NHL's opening week produced a sixteen-goal thriller and a goalie goal for the history books. This October sports quiz has eight questions about the results that mattered. The answers sit inside the text, so read straight through and keep your own score.

Every answer in this October sports quiz comes from newsroom reporting, so the score you give yourself will be an honest one.

The questions

1. Which American League team swept the Boston Red Sox in the wild-card round, winning nine to nothing in game one and nine to two in game two? Answer: the New York Yankees. They outscored Boston eighteen to two across the two games, the highest series run differential in the history of the current wild-card format, according to ESPN, and they have now knocked Boston out of the wild-card round two years running. The Yankees open the division series on the road Saturday against the Tampa Bay Rays. (NBC Sports' 2026 MLB playoffs tracker has the full bracket.)

2. Which team swept the Houston Astros, six to three and seven to three, to win its first playoff series since two thousand five? Answer: the Chicago White Sox. They were the first team to win a series this postseason, per NBC Sports, and their reward is a division series against the Cleveland Guardians starting Saturday afternoon. For a franchise that waited two decades between October series wins, the sweep was emphatic.

3. The third question in this October sports quiz goes to the only wild-card series that needed all three games. Which team beat the Philadelphia Phillies six to two in the decider to reach the division series? Answer: the Atlanta Braves. Michael Harris the second broke it open with a three-run homer in the bottom of the first, and thirty-two-year-old left-hander Ray Kerr, an unlikely opener with seventy-two and two-thirds career big league innings, threw three and a third scoreless frames in the biggest outing of his career. The Braves now face the Los Angeles Dodgers. (ESPN's wild-card live coverage and USA Today both chronicled the clincher.)

4. Which National League team swept the Chicago Cubs, eight to nothing and four to one, to set up a division series with the Milwaukee Brewers? Answer: the San Diego Padres, who outscored Chicago twelve to one across the two games. The Brewers, who had a first-round bye, host game one on Saturday night. Milwaukee's Journal Sentinel has the viewing details for the series.

That covers the baseball half of this October sports quiz. The back half heads to the NFL and the NHL.

5. Who won Thursday Night Football, twenty-seven to twenty-four, on a career-long fifty-six-yard field goal with ten seconds left? Answer: the Cleveland Browns, over the visiting Pittsburgh Steelers. Cleveland blew an eleven-point lead, then watched kicker Andre Szmyt drill the winner to seal a third straight victory. The win moved the Browns to three and one, their best start since twenty twenty-one, reported Reuters. Deshaun Watson threw for two hundred sixty-eight yards and a touchdown in the win. (Reuters' game report has the full drive chart.)

6. The sixth question of this October sports quiz stays in Cleveland. Which quarterback took five sacks and threw two interceptions in that Thursday night loss, finishing twenty-two of forty for two hundred ninety-nine yards with three touchdowns? Answer: Aaron Rodgers. His night included a late rally, an eighty-yard drive capped by a three-yard touchdown pass to Pat Freiermuth and a quarterback-sneak two-point conversion that tied the game with under two minutes left, per Reuters. Rodgers also had a heated sideline exchange with Steelers coach Mike McCarthy during the opening drive; McCarthy later said he regretted his choice of words, Athlon Sports reported.

7. The first of two hockey questions in this October sports quiz: which player had a goal and four assists as the Edmonton Oilers outgunned the Vancouver Canucks nine to seven on Thursday? Answer: Connor McDavid, and it was the fifteenth five-point game of his career, tied for the seventh most in NHL history. Defenseman Evan Bouchard added a goal and two assists, giving him eight points through two games, which broke the NHL record for most points by a defenseman in the first two games of a season. The old mark of seven was set by Harry Cameron of the Toronto Arenas in the nineteen seventeen-eighteen season, reported Reuters.

8. Which goaltender stopped twenty-four shots and then scored a goal himself, the first goalie goal in the one-hundred-year history of his Original Six club? Answer: Igor Shesterkin of the New York Rangers, who flipped a rink-long shot into an empty net with under three minutes left in a five-to-one win over Tampa Bay, according to Reuters. The same night, San Jose rookie Luca Cagnoni scored his first career NHL goal three minutes and fourteen seconds into overtime to beat the Florida Panthers four to three. Will Smith had two goals and an assist for the Sharks, and Macklin Celebrini set up three. (Reuters' NHL roundup covers both games.)

Tally your score

Seven or eight right means you watched everything, or you have excellent friends who did. Four to six right is a solid weekend fan. Three or fewer, and this October sports quiz humbly suggests catching the division series this weekend to get back up to speed. Either way, the playoffs only get louder from here.