The
National Football League (
NFL) is the
largest and most prestigious professional
American football
league, consisting of thirty-two teams from
American cities and regions. The league's teams are
divided into two conferences: the
American Football Conference (AFC) and the
National Football Conference (NFC). Each conference
is then further divided into four
divisions consisting of four teams each, labeled
North, South, East, and West. During the league's
regular season, each team plays sixteen games over a
seventeen-week period, generally from September to
December. At the end of each regular season, six teams
from each conference play in the
NFL playoffs, a twelve-team
single-elimination tournament that culminates with
the NFL championship, the
Super Bowl. This game is held at a pre-selected site
which is usually a city that hosts an NFL team. One week
later, selected all-star players from both the AFC and
NFC meet in the
Pro Bowl, currently held in
Honolulu,
Hawaii. The NFL was formed in 1920 as the
American Professional Football Association and
adopted the name National Football League in 1922. The
NFL is one of the most popular sports leagues in the
United States, and has the
highest per-game attendance of any domestic
professional sports league in the world, drawing over
67,000 spectators per game for its most recently
completed season in
2006.
[1]
Season structure
As of 2006, The NFL season features:
- A 4-game
exhibition season (or preseason) running from
early August to early September
- A 16-game, 17-week
regular season running from September to
December or early January
- A team does not win a championship or any trophy
for having the best record during the regular
season, but the league does recognize a champion for
each of the 8 divisions.
- A 12-team
playoff tournament beginning in January
culminating in the
Super Bowl in early February.
- The winner of the Super Bowl is the NFL
Champion.
Exhibition season
-
Following mini-camps in the spring and officially
recognized
Training Camp in July-August, NFL teams typically
play four
exhibition games (referred to by the NFL as
"pre-season games"; the league discourages the use of
the term "exhibition game") from early August through
early September. Two "featured" pre-season games, the
Pro Football Hall of Fame Game and
American Bowl, do not count toward the normal
allotment of four games, so the four teams playing in
those games each end up playing five exhibition games.
The games are useful for new players that are not
used to playing in front of very large crowds.
Management often uses the games to evaluate newly signed
players. Veteran starters will generally play only for
about a quarter of each game so they can avoid injury.
Playoffs
The NFL Playoffs. Each of the 4 division
winners is seeded 1–4 based on their W-L-T
records. The two Wild Card teams (labeled
Wild Card 1 and 2) are seeded 5th and 6th
(with the better of the two having seed 5)
regardless of their records compared to the
4 division winners./div>
-
The season concludes with a 12-team tournament used
to determine the teams to play in the
Super Bowl. The
tournament brackets are made up of six teams from
each of the league's two conferences, the
American Football Conference (AFC) and the
National Football Conference (NFC), following the
end of the 16-game regular season:
- The four division champions from each conference
(the team in each division with the best regular
season won-lost-tied record), which are
seeded 1 through 4 based on their regular season
won-lost-tied record.
- Two
wild card qualifiers from each conference (those
non-division champions with the conference's best
won-lost-tied percentages), which are seeded 5 and
6.
The 3 and the 6 seeded teams, and the 4 and the 5
seeds, face each other during the first round of the
playoffs, dubbed the Wild Card Playoffs (the
league in recent years has also used the term Wild
Card Weekend). The 1 and the 2 seeds from each
conference receive a
bye in the first round, which entitles these
teams to automatically advance to the second round, the
Divisional Playoff games, to face the Wild Card
survivors. In any given playoff round, the highest
surviving seed always plays the lowest surviving seed.
And in any given playoff game, whoever has the higher
seed gets the home field advantage (i.e. the game is
held at the higher seed's home field).
The two surviving teams from the Divisional Playoff
games meet in Conference Championship games, with
the winners of those contests going on to face one
another in the
Super Bowl.
