National Football League The National Football League (NFL) is the highest level of professional American football. It was formed by eleven teams in 1920 as the American Professional Football Association, with the league changing its name to the National Football League in 1922. The league currently consists of thirty-two teams from the United States. The league is divided evenly into two conferences — the American Football Conference (AFC) and National Football Conference (NFC), and each conference has four divisions that have four teams each. The NFL is organized as an unincorporated association of its 32 teams.[1][2] The NFL is by far the best attended domestic sports league in the world by average attendance per game, with 67,509 fans per game in the latest regular season (2009).[3] The regular season is a seventeen-week schedule during which each team plays sixteen games and has one bye week. The season currently starts on the Thursday night in the first full week of September (the Thursday after Labor Day) and runs weekly to late December or early January. 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 championship game, known as the Super Bowl. This game is held at a pre-selected site which is usually a city that hosts an NFL team. Selected all-star players from both the AFC and NFC meet in the Pro Bowl, which in 2010, took place a week prior to the Super Bowl, at Sun Life Stadium in Miami Gardens, Florida. The current Super Bowl champions are the New Orleans Saints, who defeated the Indianapolis Colts in Super Bowl XLIV 31–17. The history of the National Football League began in 1920, as representatives of several professional American football leagues and independent teams met at a Hupmobile dealership in Canton, Ohio. The league they formed, the American Professional Football Conference, would be mostly an informal agreement to play a common schedule and name a champion at the end of each season of play. Teams were allowed to play games outside of their league, and membership was fluid in the early years. Two years later, the league renamed itself the National Football League. Only two teams, the Decatur Staleys (now the Chicago Bears) and the Chicago Cardinals (now the Arizona Cardinals) currently in the NFL were members of the league in 1920. League membership gradually stabilized throughout the 1920s and 1930s as the league adopted progressively more formal organization. The first official championship game was held in 1933. Though the league stopped signing black players in 1927, the league reintegrated in 1946 following World War II. Other changes followed after World War II; the office of league President evolved into the more powerful Commissioner post, mirroring a similar move in Major League Baseball. Teams became more financially viable, the last team folding in 1952. By 1958, when that season's NFL championship game became known as "The Greatest Game Ever Played", the NFL was on its way to becoming one of the most popular sports leagues in the United States. A rival league, known as the American Football League, was founded in 1959. It was highly successful, and forced a merger with the older NFL that resulted in a greatly expanded league and the formation of the Super Bowl, which has become, annually, the most watched sporting event in the United States. The league continued to expand throughout the 1970s, 80s, and 90s to its current size of 32 teams. A series of labor agreements during the 1990s and increasingly large television contracts has helped keep the league one of the most profitable, as well as the only major sports league in the U.S. since 1990 to avoid a major work stoppage, though this may change if the league cannot reach an agreement for a new labor agreement by 2011. [edit] Season structure Since 2002, The NFL season features the following schedule: * 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; and * a 12-team Single-elimination playoff beginning in January, culminating in the Super Bowl in early February. Traditionally, American high school football games are played on Friday, American college football games are played on Saturday, and most NFL games are played on Sunday. Because the NFL season is longer than the college football season, the NFL schedules Saturday games and Saturday playoff games outside the college football season. The ABC Television network added Monday Night Football in 1970, and Thursday night NFL games were added in the 1980s. [edit] Exhibition season Main article: National Football League exhibition season Following mini-camps in the spring and officially recognized training camp in July–August, NFL teams typically play four exhibition games from early August through early September. Each team hosts two games of the four. The exhibition season begins with the Pro Football Hall of Fame Game, so those two teams play five exhibition games each. Historically, the American Bowl(s) were played prior to the NFL scheduling regular season games abroad and those teams faced this similar predicament. The games are useful for new players who 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 to minimize the risk of injury. Several lawsuits have been brought by fans, against the policy of including exhibition games in season-ticket packages at regular season prices, but none have so far been very successful. Following the preseason, each of the thirty-two teams embark on a seventeen-week, sixteen-game schedule, with the extra week consisting of a bye to allow teams a rest sometime in the middle of the season (and also to increase television coverage). The regular season currently begins the Thursday evening after Labor Day with a primetime "Kickoff Game" (NBC currently holds broadcast rights for that game). According to the current scheduling structure, the earliest the season could begin is September 4 (as it was in the 2008 season), while the latest would be September 10 (as it was in the 2009 season, due to September 1 falling on a Tuesday). Each of the thirty-two teams' schedules are organized in the following way: * Each team plays the other three teams in their division twice: once at home, and once on the road (six games). * Each team plays the four teams from another division within its own conference once on a rotating three-year cycle: two at home, and two on the road (four games). * Each team plays the four teams from a division in the other conference once on a rotating four-year cycle: two at home, and two on the road (four games). * Each team plays once against the other teams in its conference that finished in the same place in their own divisions as themselves the previous season, not counting the division they were already scheduled to play: one at home, one on the road (two games). The season concludes with a twelve-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 one through four based on their regular season won-lost-tied record (tie-breaker rules may apply). * Two wild card qualifiers from each conference (those non-division champions with the conference's best record, i.e. the best won-lost-tied percentages, with a series of tie-breaking rules in place in the event that there are teams with the same number of wins and losses[4]), which are seeded five and six. In each conference, the #3 and #6 seeded teams, and the #4 and #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 #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 winning teams from the first round. In round two, the highest surviving seed (#1) always plays the lowest surviving seed in their conference. 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 in a game located at a neutral venue that is either indoors or in a warm-weather locale. The designated "home team" alternates year to year between the conferences. In Super Bowl XLIV, the AFC Champion was the "home" team. The Pro Bowl, the league's all-star game, has been traditionally held on the weekend after the Super Bowl. The game was played at various venues before being held at Aloha Stadium in Honolulu, Hawaii for 30 consecutive seasons from 1980 to 2009. However, the 2010 Pro Bowl was played at Sun Life Stadium, the home stadium of the Miami Dolphins and host site of Super Bowl XLIV, on January 31, the first time ever that the Pro Bowl was played before the championship game. The 2011 and 2012 games will return to Honolulu. The NFL consists of thirty-two clubs. Each club is allowed a maximum of fifty-three players on their roster, but they may only dress forty-five to play each week during the regular season. Unlike Major League Baseball, Major League Soccer, the National Basketball Association and the National Hockey League, the league has no full-time teams in Canada, although the Buffalo Bills play one game per year in Toronto. Most teams are in the eastern half of the United States; seventeen teams are in the Eastern Time Zone and nine others in the Central Time Zone. Most major metropolitan areas in the United States have an NFL franchise, although Los Angeles, the second-largest metropolitan area in the country, has not hosted an NFL team since 1994. Further information: History of the National Football League in Los Angeles The Rams and the Raiders called the Los Angeles area home from 1946–1994 and 1982–1994 respectively. In 2005, some Saints games were played in San Antonio and Baton Rouge because of Hurricane Katrina. Also, there is talk of possibly bringing the NFL to Toronto, the largest city of Canada. The most frequently mentioned team for such a move is the aforementioned Buffalo Bills, who play 90 miles (140 km) south in Buffalo, play some of their games in Toronto's Rogers Centre, and are owned by a man now in his nineties (Ralph Wilson) who has no apparent plans to keep the team in his family upon his death.[5] The Dallas Cowboys are the highest valued American football franchise, valued at approximately $1.6 billion[6] and one of the most valuable franchises in all of professional sports worldwide, currently second only to English soccer club Manchester United,[6] which has an approximate value of $1.8 billion at current exchange rates.[7] (Incidentally, the majority shareholder in United, Malcolm Glazer, also owns an NFL team of his own, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.) Since the 2002 season, the teams have been aligned as follows: