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The National Football League (NFL) is the largest and most popular professional American football league in the world, consisting of thirty-two teams from American cities. The league was formed in 1920 as the American Professional Football Association, which adopted the name "National Football League" in 1922.

In recent decades, the NFL traditionally started the regular season on Labor Day Weekend and lasted through Christmas week. However, declining television ratings on Labor Day have pushed the start of the regular season ahead one week (which is where scheduling currently stands), although for the past two years, the regular season has begun on the Thursday after Labor Day.

At the end of each season, the winners of the playoffs in the American Football Conference and the National Football Conference meet in the NFL championship, the Super Bowl (held in different cities, in both team sites and neutral sites), and one week later, selected all-star players from both the AFC and NFC meet in the Pro Bowl, currently held in Hawaii.

Current NFL Franchises

Playoffs

At the conclusion of each 16-game regular season, six teams from each conference qualify for the playoffs, which culminate in the Super Bowl championship game:

The four division champions, which are seeded #1 through #4 based on their regular season won-lost-tied record, and
Two "wild card" qualifiers (those non-division champions with the conference's best won-lost-tied percentages), who are seeded #5 and #6 within the conference.

The #3 and #6 seeded teams, and the #4 and #5 seeded teams, face each other during the playoffs first round, dubbed the "Wild Card Round." The #1 and #2 seeds from each conference do not participate in this round, earning an automatic berth in the following week's "Divisional Playoff" games, where they face the Wild Card survivors. In a given game, whoever has the higher seed gets the home field advantage.

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.

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