From Wiki­Collectables, Buy • Sell • Collect • Wiki

View the top articles!

The National Football League (NFL) is the largest professional American football league in the world. It is an unincorporated association controlled by its members.^[1] It was formed by eleven teams in 1920 as the American Professional Football Association (the league changed the name to American Professional Football League in 1921 and then settled on its current name in 1922). The league currently consists of thirty-two teams from American cities and regions, divided evenly into two conferences — the American Football Conference (AFC) and National Football Conference (NFC) — of 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 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 (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. The following week, selected all-star players from both the AFC and NFC meet in the Pro Bowl, held in Honolulu, Hawaii.

While baseball is known as America's "national pastime," football is the most popular sport in the United States. According to the Harris Poll, professional football moved ahead of baseball as the fans' favorite in 1965 and has remained America's favorite sport ever since. In a Harris sports poll done in 2007, the NFL was the favorite sport of nearly as many people (29 percent) as the combined total of the next three professional sports – baseball (14 percent), auto racing (nine percent) and men’s pro basketball (seven percent). ^[2] Additionally, Football's American TV viewership ratings now surpass those of other sports.^[3]

The NFL has the highest per-game attendance of any domestic professional sports league in the world, drawing over 67,000 spectators per game for each of its two most recently completed seasons, 2006 and 2007.^[4] However, the NFL's overall attendance is only approximately 20% of that of Major League Baseball, due to MLB's much longer schedule (about 162+ games).

[edit] See also

• Current NFL coaches
• Defunct NFL teams
• Glossary of American football
• Index of Professional Sports teams in the United States and Canada
• Instant replay
• National Football League depth charts
• National Football League stadiums
• List of American football players
• List of current NFL announcers
• List of Professional Football Drafts
• List of sports attendance figures — the NFL's attendance in a worldwide context
• List of TV markets and major sports teams

[edit] Further reading

• "NFL Scores Nearly $18 Billion in TV Rights", by Stefan Fatsis and Kyle Pope, 14 January 1998, The Wall Street Journal (p. B1)[1]
• NFL's Economic Model Shows Signs of Strain
• Process of game-time decisions will eliminate TV duds, create chaos by Michael Hiestand, USA Today, April 5, 2006 (Last accessed April 5, 2006)
• Five NFL teams worth over $1 billion

[edit] External links

• Official NFL website
• Official NFL players website
• Official Super Bowl website
• NFL History - Champion and Award Lists
• NFL Digest of Rules
• ESPN.com's NFL Section
• NFL Video at ESPN's Video Archive
• Pro Football Reference - Historical stats of every team, player and coach in the NFL