The National Football League (
NFL) is the largest and most
prestigious professional
American football league, consisting of thirty-two teams from American cities and regions. The league's teams are divided into two conferences:
the American Football Conference (AFC) and
the National Football Conference (NFC). Each conference is then
further divided into
four divisions consisting of four teams each, labeled
North,
South, East, and
West. During the league's regular season, each team plays sixteen
games over a seventeen-week period, generally from September to 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. Two weeks later, selected all-star
players from both the AFC and NFC meet in the Pro Bowl, currently held in
Honolulu,
Hawaii. The NFL was formed in 1920 as the American Professional Football Association and adopted the
name National Football League in 1922. The NFL is
one of the most
popular sports leagues 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.
; "NFL.com")
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