About the NFL

The acronym NFL stands for the National Football League, the most popular professional sports league in the entire United States. Many people who are not of American extraction may confuse the term "football" with futbol, or soccer. The NFL started operations in 1920 as the American Professional Football Association and had eleven teams during its inaugural year.

Each team has 11 players and these players generally focus upon either offense or defense. The object of the game is to move the football across the goal line. The field of play is 100 yards in length. Each time that a player crosses the goal line, his team scores 6 points for a touchdown. After a touchdown, the team then tries to kick the ball through an upright goal post that resembles a Y with a flat crossbar. This is an extra point, which will give 7 points. A team gets a set of four plays, called downs, to get ten yards. Otherwise, they have to turn the ball over to the other team. A team can try to kick the ball through the uprights for a field goal and 3 points. A team that is tacked behind their own goal line give up 2 points in what is known as a safety.

Today, the NFL has 32 teams that spread throughout many of the largest cities in America. For the past few years, two teams have played a neutral site regular season game in London, England. Preseason games are frequently held in other locales, but no teams are headquartered outside the continental United States. The League headquarters are housed in Manhattan, New York. One of the coolest things about the NFL is the short season that makes every game very important to a team's playoff hopes.

The NFL season is spread throughout the year, with spring mini-camps and the annual NFL Draft, which is held in April. Many of the higher draft picks take a while to sign contracts and frequently miss the official start of training camp in July. Each of the teams plays a total of four preseason games before the regular season starts. Fans who attend these games generally see little of their favorite stars as the teams try out their draft picks and free agent signees.

The NFL regular season lasts 17 weeks and has started on a weeknight during the week of Labor Day in September for the past few years. Each team plays 16 games during the regular season, with eight games coming at home and eight on the road. The League is broken into eight divisions with four teams each. Two conferences, the National Football Conference and the American Football Conference, each have four divisions.

The NFL Playoffs generally start the first weekend of January. Six teams in each conference make the playoffs. Each of the division winners is guaranteed a spot. The two teams with the best records that did not qualify for the playoffs as division winners are given "wild card" spots in the playoffs. There are often tie-breakers invoked when determining division winners or wild card qualifiers.

The two wild card teams play the division winners with the worst records in the wild card round. The next week sees the top two seeds play the winners of the wild card games in the divisional playoffs. The third week of the NFL Playoffs pits the winners of the divisional games in the conference championships. Both conferences follow the same pattern, and the winners of the AFC and NFC championships play in the annual Super Bowl, which generally takes place two weeks after the conference championships.

One of the most popular aspect about the NFL is the annual Super Bowl. The world champion of the NFL is annually decided in the Super Bowl, which goes back to the period before the merger of the old NFL and the upstart American Football League (which largely became the AFC) in 1970. The Green Bay Packers and the Kansas City Chiefs played the first AFL-NFL Championship in 1967. NBC and CBS both televised the game, which had nowhere near the fanfare of modern Super Bowls. From this inauspicious start in which Green Bay won 35-10, the Super Bowl was born.

Today, the Super Bowl is usually the most-watched television program in America each year. Some people watch the game for the commercials that companies roll out for the event. The most recent Super Bowl saw the Seattle Seahawks clobber the Denver Broncos for their first ever Super Bowl title. The all-time leading franchise for Super Bowl titles is the Pittsburgh Steelers, with six. The Green Bay Packers have won the most NFL titles at 13, which includes titles earned before the Super Bowl era.