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National Football League - NFL

NFL

The National Football League (NFL) is the largest and most prestigious professional American football league. It is an unincorporated association controlled by its members.[1] It was formed by eleven teams in 1920 as the American Professional Football Association and adopted the name National Football League in 1922. The league currently consists of thirty-two teams from American cities and regions, divided evenly into two conferences (AFC and NFC), with four, four-team divisions.

The regular season is a seventeen-week schedule during which each team has one bye week and plays sixteen games. This schedule includes a round robin of six games against a team's divisional rivals, as well as several inter-division and inter-conference games. The season currently starts on the Thursday night in the first full week of September and runs weekly to late 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. Two weeks later, selected all-star players from both the AFC and NFC meet in the Pro Bowl, currently held in Honolulu, Hawaii.

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.

Modern Era

In the 1970s and 1980s, the NFL solidified its dominance as America's top spectator sport and its important role in American culture. The Super Bowl became an unofficial national holiday and the top-rated TV program most years. Monday Night Football, which first aired in 1970 brought in high ratings by mixing sports and entertainment. Rule changes in the late 1970s ensured a fast-paced game with lots of passing to attract the casual fan.

The founding of the United States Football League in the early 1980s was the biggest challenge to the NFL in the post-merger era. The USFL was a well-financed competitor with big-name players and a national television contract. However, the USFL failed to make money and folded after three years. The USFL filed a successful anti-trust lawsuit against the NFL, but the remedies were minimal.

In recent years, the NFL has expanded into new markets and ventures. In 1986, the league began holding a series of pre-season exhibition games, called American Bowls, held at international sites outside the United States. Then in 1991, the league formed the World League of American Football, later known as NFL Europe and still later as NFL Europa, a developmental league that had teams in Germany and the Netherlands when the NFL shut it down in June 2007. The league played a regular-season NFL game in Mexico City in 2005 and intends to play more such games in other countries. In 2003, the NFL launched its own cable-television channel, NFL Network.

The NFL proper has announced that this season, a regular season game between the Miami Dolphins and the New York Giants will be held outside of North America. This game will be held in Wembley Stadium, the new 90,000-seat stadium in London. It is expected to be a great success with nearly 40,000 tickets already sold. This game is to be played on October 28, 2007. It is also expected to be one of the most watched regular season games in history, due to it being the first regular season game away from North America.

On August 31, a story in USA Today unveiled the first changes to the league's shield logo since 1970, which will take effect with the 2008 season. The redesign reduces the number of stars in the logo from 25 (which were found not to have a meaning beyond decorative) to eight (for each of the league's divisions), the logo's football repositioned in the manner of the Vince Lombardi Trophy, and the NFL letters in a straight serifed font (which resembles the current typeface used in other NFL logos). The redesign was created with television and digital media, along with clothing in mind. The shield logo dates to the 1940s.

Season Structure

As of 2007, 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

Each team's schedule is based on the previous season's standings. The schedule breaks down as follows:

• 6 games against the three Divisional opponents, one game at home and one away.
• 4 games against an in-conference Division.
• 4 games against an opposite-conference Division(The division played is based on a rotation.)
• 2 games against the teams that finished in the same place in their respective division the previous season (i.e. 2nd place) in the same conference, omitting the division that the team's division is already paired up with
• 1 Bye week where no game is played

A team does not win a championship or any trophy for having the best record during the regular season, but they do receive home-field advantage in the playoffs in each conference.

The league also recognizes 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.

Regular Season

Following the preseason, each of the 32 teams embark on a 17 week, 16 game schedule, with the extra week consisting of a bye to allow teams a rest before the upcoming playoff run. Each of the 32 teams' schedules are organized in the following way (using the 2007 Indianapolis Colts' schedule as a model):

• Each team plays the three other clubs in its division twice, once on its home field and once on the opponent's home field, for a total of SIX GAMES (Indianapolis plays Co-AFC South Division members Jacksonville, Houston, and Tennessee twice each).
• Each team plays every club in one other same-conference division once, splitting those games evenly at home and on the road for a total of FOUR GAMES; the other three divisional rivals also play each of these four teams from that same-conference Division (Indianapolis plays AFC West Division members Denver, Kansas City, Oakland, and San Diego once each).
• Each team plays every club in one opposite-conference division once, splitting those games evenly at home and on the road for a total of FOUR GAMES; the other three divisional rivals also play each of these four teams from that opposite-conference division (Indianapolis plays NFC South Division members Atlanta, Carolina, New Orleans, and Tampa Bay once each).
• The final TWO GAMES are played against one team from each of the two remaining same-conference divisions that the franchise does not already have on its schedule, splitting those games evenly at home and on the road; the three divisional rivals also play the three other teams from each of those divisions as well (Indianapolis plays AFC East Division member New England, and AFC North Division member Baltimore; Houston, Jacksonville, and Tennessee all play AFC North/AFC East members Cleveland/Miami, Pittsburgh/Buffalo, and Cincinnati/New York Jets once each, respectively).

Playoffs

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.