The National Football League
The National Football League (NFL) is the highest level of professional American
football in the United States, and is
considered the top professional American football league globally. It was formed by eleven teams in 1920
as the American Professional Football Association, with the league
changing its name to the National Football League in 1922. The league currently
consists ofthirty-two teams from the United States. 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 NFL is an unincorporated 501(c)(6) association a federal nonprofit designation, comprising its 32 teams.
The regular
season is a seventeen-week schedule during which each team plays sixteen games
and has one bye week. The season currently 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. This game is held at a pre-selected site which is usually a city that
hosts an NFL team.
The NFL is the most attended domestic sports league in the world by average attendance per game, with
66,960 fans per game in 2010–11.[8] Although not as frequently as the other major professional sports
leagues in the United States,
the NFL still is not immune to labor disputes, such as the players' strikes of 1982 and 1987, and more recently a lockout in 2011, though the latest did not result in the cancellation of any
regular-season games.
Season structure
Since 2002, the
NFL season features the following schedule:
a 4-game exhibition season (or preseason) running from early August to early September;
a 16-game,
17-week regular
season running from September to December or early January; and
а 12-team single-elimination playoff beginning in January, culminating in the Super Bowl in early February.
Pro Bowl
The Pro Bowl,
the league's all-star game, has been traditionally held on the weekend before the Super Bowl. The
game was played at various venues before being held at Aloha Stadiumin Honolulu, Hawaii for 30 consecutive seasons from 1980 to 2009.
However, the 2010 Pro Bowl was played at Sun Life Stadium, the home stadium of the Miami Dolphins and host site of Super Bowl XLIV, on January 31, the first time ever that the Pro Bowl was played before the championship game. The game
returned to Honolulu in 2011 and 2012, though both games were still played
before the Super Bowl.
Teams
The NFL
consists of thirty-two
clubs. Each club is allowed a maximum
of fifty-three players on their roster, but may only dress forty-five to play
each week during the regular season. Reflecting the population distribution of
the United States as a whole, most teams are in the eastern half of the
country; seventeen teams are in the Eastern Time Zone and nine others in the Central Time Zone.
Most major metropolitan areas in the United States
have an NFL franchise,
although Los Angeles, the second-largest metropolitan area in the country, has
not hosted an NFL team since 1994.
The Rams and the Raiders called the Los Angeles area home from 1946–1994 and 1982–1994 respectively. On August 9, 2011, the
LA City Council approved plans to build Farmers Field which could be home to an NFL team. It is unknown which team, if any,
will move to the venue.
Unlike Major League
Baseball, Major League
Soccer, the National Basketball Association and theNational
Hockey League, the league has no
full-time teams in Canada, although the Buffalo Billsplay one game per
year in Toronto. There has been discussion of possibly bringing the NFL to Toronto, the largest city in Canada. In addition, as of 2012, the St. Louis Rams will begin hosting one of its regular season games in London, England as
part of the International Series, making the NFL the first U.S.-based sports league to have one of its
teams establish a home stadium outside North America.
The Dallas Cowboys are the highest valued American football franchise, valued at
approximately $1.6 billion and
one of the most valuable franchises in all of professional sports worldwide,
currently second behind English soccer club Manchester
United, which has an approximate value of
$1.8 billion at current exchange rates
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