National Football League

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"NFL" redirects here. For other leagues of the same name and other uses, see National
Football League (disambiguation) and NFL (disambiguation).

National Football League

Current season, competition or edition:

 2021 NFL season

Formerly American Professional Football Conference (1920)

American Professional Football Association (1920–

1921)

Sport American football

Founded September 17, 1920; 101 years ago

Canton, Ohio, U.S.

Inaugural season 1920

Commissioner Roger Goodell

No. of teams 32

Country United States[A]

Headquarters 345 Park Avenue

New York, NY 10154

U.S.

Most recent Tampa Bay Buccaneers

champion(s) (2nd title)

Most titles Green Bay Packers

(13 titles)[B]

TV partner(s) United States:

CBS

Fox

NBC

ESPN

NFL Network

Telemundo Deportes

International: Broadcasters

Official website www.nfl.com

NFL lists

show

Quarterbacks

show

Running backs
 show

Receivers

show

Defense

show

Special teams

show

Other lists

 v
 t
 e

The National Football League (NFL) is a professional American

football league consisting of 32 teams, divided equally between the National Football
Conference (NFC) and the American Football Conference (AFC). The NFL is one of
the four major North American professional sports leagues and the highest professional
level of American football in the world.[3] Its eighteen-week regular season runs from
early September to early January, with each team playing seventeen games and having
one bye week. Following the conclusion of the regular season, seven teams from each
conference (four division winners and three wild card teams) advance to the playoffs,
a single-elimination tournament culminating in the Super Bowl, which is usually held on
the first Sunday in February and is played between the champions of the NFC and AFC.
The league is headquartered in New York City.
The NFL was formed in 1920 as the American Professional Football
Association (APFA) before renaming itself the National Football League for the 1922
season. After initially determining champions through end-of-season standings, a
playoff system was implemented in 1933 that culminated with the NFL Championship
Game until 1966. Following an agreement to merge the NFL with the rival American
Football League (AFL), the Super Bowl was first held in 1967 to determine a champion
between the best teams from the two leagues and has remained as the final game of
each NFL season since the merger was completed in 1970. [4] The NFL has the highest
average attendance (67,591) of any professional sports league in the world [5] and is the
most popular sports league in the United States.[6] The Super Bowl is also among the
 biggest club sporting events in the world,[7] with the individual games accounting for
many of the most watched television programs in American history and all occupying
the Nielsen's Top 5 tally of the all-time most watched U.S. television broadcasts by
2015.[8] The NFL is the wealthiest professional sports league by revenue[9] and the sports
league with the most valuable teams.[10]
The Green Bay Packers hold the most combined NFL championships with thirteen,
winning nine titles before the Super Bowl era and four Super Bowls afterwards. Since
the creation of the Super Bowl, the Pittsburgh Steelers and New England Patriots have
the most championship titles at six.

Contents

 1History

o 1.1Founding and history

o 1.2Season and playoff development

 2Corporate structure

 3Teams

 4Season format

o 4.1Preseason

o 4.2Regular season

o 4.3Postseason

 5Trophies and awards

o 5.1Team trophies

o 5.2Player and coach awards

 6Media coverage

 7Draft

 8Free agency

 9See also

 10References
 o 10.1Explanatory notes

o 10.2Citations

o 10.3Bibliography

 11External links

History
Main articles: History of the National Football League and History of American football

Founding and history

On August 20, 1920, a meeting was held by representatives of the Akron Pros, Canton
Bulldogs, Cleveland Indians, and Dayton Triangles at the Jordan and Hupmobile auto
showroom in Canton, Ohio.[11] This meeting resulted in the formation of the American
Professional Football Conference (APFC), a group who, according to the Canton
Evening Repository, intended to "raise the standard of professional football in every way
possible, to eliminate bidding for players between rival clubs and to secure cooperation
in the formation of schedules".[12]
Another meeting was held on September 17, 1920 with representatives from teams
from four states: Akron, Canton, Cleveland, and Dayton from Ohio; the Hammond
Pros and Muncie Flyers from Indiana; the Rochester Jeffersons from New York; and
the Rock Island Independents, Decatur Staleys, and Racine (Chicago) Cardinals from
Illinois.[13][14] The league was renamed to the American Professional Football Association
(APFA).[12] The league elected Jim Thorpe as its first president, and consisted of fourteen
teams (the Buffalo All-Americans, Chicago Tigers, Columbus Panhandles, and Detroit
Heralds joined the league during the year). The Massillon Tigers from Massillon,
Ohio was also at the September 17 meeting, but did not field a team in 1920. Only two
of these teams, the Decatur Staleys (now the Chicago Bears) and the Chicago
Cardinals (now the Arizona Cardinals), remain in the NFL. [15]

The Akron Pros won the first APFA (NFL) Championship in 1920.

Although the league did not maintain official standings for its 1920 inaugural season and
teams played schedules that included non-league opponents, the APFA awarded the
Akron Pros the championship by virtue of their 8–0–3 record.[16] The first event occurred
on September 26, 1920 when the Rock Island Independents defeated the non-league
St. Paul Ideals 48–0 at Douglas Park.[11][17] On October 3, 1920, the first full week of
league play occurred.[18][19] The following season resulted in the Chicago
Staleys controversially winning the title over the Buffalo All-Americans.[20] On June 24,
1922, the APFA changed its name to the National Football League (NFL). [21][22]
In 1932, the season ended with the Chicago Bears (6–1–6) and the Portsmouth
Spartans (6–1–4) tied for first in the league standings.[23] At the time, teams were ranked
on a single table and the team with the highest winning percentage (not including ties,
which were not counted towards the standings) at the end of the season was declared
the champion; the only tiebreaker was that in the event of a tie if two teams played twice
in a season, the result of the second game determined the title (the source of the 1921
controversy). This method had been used since the league's creation in 1920, but no
situation had been encountered where two teams were tied for first. The league quickly
determined that a playoff game between Chicago and Portsmouth was needed to
decide the league's champion. The teams were originally scheduled to play the playoff
game, officially a regular-season game that would count towards the regular season
standings, at Wrigley Field in Chicago, but a combination of heavy snow and extreme
cold forced the game to be moved indoors to Chicago Stadium, which did not have a
regulation-size football field. Playing with altered rules to accommodate the smaller
playing field, the Bears won the game 9–0 and thus won the championship. Fan interest
in the de facto championship game led the NFL, beginning in 1933, to split into two
divisions with a championship game to be played between the division champions.
[24]
 The 1934 season also marked the first of twelve seasons in which African Americans
were absent from the league. The de facto ban was rescinded in 1946, following public
pressure and coinciding with the removal of a similar ban in Major League Baseball.[25]
The NFL was always the largest professional football league in the United States; it
nevertheless faced numerous rival professional leagues through the 1930s and 1940s.
Rival leagues included at least three separate American Football Leagues and the All-
America Football Conference (AAFC), on top of various regional leagues of varying
caliber. Three NFL teams trace their histories to these rival leagues, including the Los
Angeles Rams (who came from a 1936 iteration of the American Football League),
the Cleveland Browns and San Francisco 49ers (the last two of which came from the
AAFC). By the 1950s, the NFL had an effective monopoly on professional football in the
United States; its only competition in North America was the professional Canadian
football circuit, which formally became the Canadian Football League (CFL) in 1958.
With Canadian football being a different football code than the American game, the CFL
established a niche market in Canada and still survives as an independent league.
A new professional league, the fourth American Football League (AFL), began to play in
1960. The upstart AFL began to challenge the established NFL in popularity, gaining
lucrative television contracts and engaging in a bidding war with the NFL for free agents
and draft picks. The two leagues announced a merger on June 8, 1966, to take full
effect in 1970. In the meantime, the leagues would hold a common draft and
championship game. The game, the Super Bowl, was held four times before the
merger, with the NFL winning Super Bowl I and Super Bowl II, and the AFL
winning Super Bowl III and Super Bowl IV.[26] After the league merged, it was
reorganized into two conferences: the National Football Conference (NFC), consisting
of most of the pre-merger NFL teams, and the American Football Conference (AFC),
consisting of all of the AFL teams as well as three pre-merger NFL teams. [27]
Today,[when?] the NFL is the most popular sports league in North America; much of its
growth is attributed to former Commissioner Pete Rozelle, who led the league from
1960 to 1989. Overall annual attendance increased from 3 million at the beginning of his
tenure to 17 million by the end of his tenure, and 400 million global viewers watched
1989's Super Bowl XXIII.[28] The NFL established NFL Properties in 1963. The league's
licensing wing, NFL Properties earns the league billions of dollars annually; Rozelle's
tenure also marked the creation of NFL Charities and a national partnership with United
Way.[28] Paul Tagliabue was elected as commissioner to succeed Rozelle; his
seventeen-year tenure, which ended in 2006, was marked by large increases in
television contracts and the addition of four expansion teams, [29] as well as the
introduction of league initiatives to increase the number of minorities in league and team
management roles.[30] The league's current Commissioner, Roger Goodell, has focused
on reducing the number of illegal hits and making the sport safer, mainly through fining
or suspending players who break rules.[31] These actions are among many the NFL is
taking to reduce concussions and improve player safety.[32] Prior to 2021, the NFL had
utilized race-based adjustments of dementia claims in the $1 billion settlement of
concussion claims, which had been criticized by critics before the NFL decided to end
what was called "race-norming".[33][34]
Season and playoff development
Main article: List of National Football League seasons

From 1920 to 1934, the NFL did not have a set number of games for teams to play,
instead setting a minimum. The league mandated a twelve-game regular season for
each team beginning in 1935, later shortening this to eleven games in 1937 and ten
games in 1943, mainly due to World War II. After the war ended, the number of games
returned to eleven games in 1946, and later back to twelve in 1947. The NFL went to a
fourteen-game schedule in 1961, which it retained until switching to a sixteen-game
schedule in 1978.[35] In March 2021, the NFL officially adopted a seventeen-game
schedule after gaining the agreement of the National Football League Players
Association (NFLPA).[36]
Having an odd number of games in the schedule will give half the teams nine games as
the home team while half the teams have only eight home games. To minimize the
perceived benefit on competition of having more home games, the extra home game
will be rotated between the two conferences each year. This is because playoff berths
are allocated at the conference level, so all teams within the conference will have
played the same number of home games.
The NFL operated in a two-conference system from 1933 to 1966, where the
champions of each conference would meet in the NFL Championship Game. If two
teams tied for the conference lead, they would meet in a one-game playoff to determine
the conference champion. In 1967, the NFL expanded from fifteen teams to sixteen
teams. Instead of just evening out the conferences by adding the expansion New
Orleans Saints to the seven-member Western Conference, the NFL realigned the
conferences and split each into two four-team divisions. The four division champions
would meet in the NFL playoffs, a two-round playoff.[37] The NFL also operated
the Playoff Bowl (officially the Bert Bell Benefit Bowl) from 1960 to 1969. Effectively
a third-place game, pitting the two conference runners-up against each other, the
league considers Playoff Bowls to have been exhibitions rather than playoff games. The
league discontinued the Playoff Bowl in 1970 due to its perception as a game for losers.
[38]

Following the addition of the former AFL teams into the NFL in 1970, the NFL split into
two conferences with three divisions each. The expanded league, now with twenty-six
teams,[27] would also feature an expanded eight-team playoff, the participants being the
three division champions from each conference as well as one 'wild card' team (the
team with the best win percentage) from each conference. In 1978, the league added a
second wild card team from each conference, bringing the total number of playoff teams
to ten, and a further two wild card teams were added in 1990 to bring the total to twelve.
When the NFL expanded to 32 teams in 2002, the league realigned, changing the
division structure from three divisions in each conference to four divisions in each
conference. As each division champion gets a playoff bid, the number of wild card
teams from each conference dropped from three to two. [39] The playoffs expanded again
in 2020, adding two more wild card teams to bring the total to fourteen playoff teams. [40]

Corporate structure
See also: History of the NFL Commissioner

NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell

At the corporate level, the National Football League considers itself a trade
association made up of and financed by its 32 member teams. [41] Up until 2015, the
league was an unincorporated nonprofit 501(c)(6) association.[42] Section 501(c)(6) of the
Internal Revenue Code provides an exemption from federal income taxation for
"Business leagues, chambers of commerce, real-estate boards, boards of trade, or
professional football leagues (whether or not administering a pension fund for football
players), not organized for profit and no part of the net earnings of which inures to the
benefit of any private shareholder or individual." [43] In contrast, each individual team
(except the non-profit Green Bay Packers[44]) is subject to tax because they make a
profit.[45]
The NFL gave up the tax-exempt status in 2015 following public criticism; in a letter to
the club owners, Commissioner Roger Goodell labeled it a "distraction", saying "the
effects of the tax-exempt status of the league office have been mischaracterized
repeatedly in recent years... Every dollar of income generated through television rights
fees, licensing agreements, sponsorships, ticket sales, and other means is earned by
the 32 clubs and is taxable there. This will remain the case even when the league office
and Management Council file returns as taxable entities and the change in filing status
will make no material difference to our business." As a result, the league office might
owe around US$10 million in income taxes, but it is no longer required to disclose the
salaries of its executive officers.[46]
The league has three defined officers: the commissioner, secretary, and treasurer. Each
conference has one defined officer, the president, which is essentially an honorary
position with few powers and mostly ceremonial duties, including awarding the
conference championship trophy.
The commissioner is elected by the affirmative vote of two-thirds or eighteen (whichever
is greater) of the members of the league, while the president of each conference is
elected by an affirmative vote of three-fourths or 10 of the conference members. [47] The
commissioner appoints the secretary and treasurer and has broad authority in disputes
between clubs, players, coaches, and employees. He is the "principal executive
officer"[48] of the NFL and also has authority in hiring league employees, negotiating
television contracts, disciplining individuals that own part or all of an NFL team, clubs, or
employed individuals of an NFL club if they have violated league bylaws or committed
"conduct detrimental to the welfare of the League or professional football". [48] The
commissioner can, in the event of misconduct by a party associated with the league,
suspend individuals, hand down a fine of up to US$500,000, cancel contracts with the
league, and award or strip teams of draft picks.[48]
In extreme cases, the commissioner can offer recommendations to the NFL's Executive
Committee up to and including the "cancellation or forfeiture" [48] of a club's franchise or
any other action, he deems necessary. The commissioner can also issue sanctions up
to and including a lifetime ban from the league if an individual connected to the NFL has
bet on games or failed to notify the league of conspiracies or plans to bet on or fix
games.[48] The current Commissioner of the National Football League is Roger Goodell,
who was elected in 2006 after Paul Tagliabue, the previous commissioner, retired.[49]