National Football League

The National Football League (NFL) is the largest and most prestigious professional American football league. It is an unincorporated association controlled by its members. 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 — the AFC and 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 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. The following week, selected all-star players from both the AFC and NFC meet in the Pro Bowl, currently held in Honolulu, Hawaii.

The NFL is arguably the most popular sports league 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. However, the NFL's overall attendance is only approximately 20% of that of Major League Baseball, due to MLB's much longer schedule, currently 162 games per team with 81 home games each, plus playoffs.