The National Football League

The National Football League (NFL) is the highest level of professional American football in the United States. The league currently consists of thirty-two teams. The league is divided evenly into two conferences — the American Football Conference (AFC) and National Football Conference (NFC), and each conference has four divisions that have four teams each, for a total of 16 teams in each conference. The regular season is a seventeen-week schedule during which each team plays sixteen games and has one bye week. The season starts on the Thursday night in the first full week of September and runs weekly to late December or early January. At the end of each regular season, six teams from each conference (at least one from each division) play in the NFL playoffs, a twelve-team single-elimination tournament that culminates with the championship game, known as the Super Bowl.