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The National Football League (NFL) is the largest professional American football league in the world. It is an unincorporated 501(c)(6) association controlled by its members.[1] It was formed by eleven teams in 1920 as the American Professional Football Association (the league changed the name to American Professional Football League in 1921 and then settled on its current name in 1922). The league currently consists of thirty-two teams from American cities and regions, divided evenly into two conferences — the American Football Conference (AFC) and National Football Conference (NFC) — of four four-team divisions.
The regular season is a seventeen-week schedule during which each team has one bye week and plays sixteen games. This schedule includes six games against a team's divisional rivals, as well as several inter-division and inter-conference games. The season currently starts on the Thursday night in the first full week of September (the Thursday after Labor Day) and runs weekly to late December or early January.
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 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 following week, selected all-star players from both the AFC and NFC meet in the Pro Bowl, held in Honolulu, Hawaii.
While baseball is known as America's "national pastime," football is the most popular sport in the United States. According to the Harris Poll, professional football moved ahead of baseball as the fans' favorite in 1965 and has remained America's favorite sport ever since. In a Harris sports poll done in 2008, the NFL was the favorite sport of nearly as many people (30 percent) as the combined total of the next four professional sports – baseball (fifteen percent), auto racing (ten percent), hockey (five percent) and men’s pro basketball (four percent), [2] Additionally, Football's American TV viewership ratings now surpass those of other sports.[3]
The NFL has the highest per-game attendance of any domestic professional sports league in the world, drawing over 67,000 spectators per game for each of its two most recently completed seasons, 2006[4] and 2007.[5] However, the NFL's overall attendance is only approximately 20% of that of Major League Baseball, due to MLB's much longer schedule (about 162+ games).
By the middle of the 1960s, competition for players, including separate college drafts, was driving up player salaries. In 1965, in the most high profile such contest and a major boost to the AFL, University of Alabama quarterback Joe Namath signed with the New York Jets in preference to the NFL's St. Louis Cardinals for a then-record $427,000. In 1966, the AFL Commissioner Al Davis embarked on a campaign to sign players away from the NFL, especially quarterbacks, but behind the scenes a number of team owners began action to end the detrimental rivalry.
In an agreement brokered by AFL founder Lamar Hunt and Dallas Cowboys General Manager Tex Schramm, the two leagues announced their merger deal on 8 June 1966. The leagues would henceforth hold a combined draft and an end-of-season title game between the two league champions (later known as the Super Bowl). Still another city received an NFL frachise thanks to the AFL, as New Orleans was awarded an NFL team after Louisiana's federal Congressmen pushed for the passage of Public Law 89-800, which permitted the merger and exempted the action from Anti-Trust restrictions. The monopoly that would be created needed to be legitimized by an act of Congress. In 1970, the leagues fully merged under the name National Football League and divided into two conferences of an equal number of teams. There was also a financial settlement, with the AFL paying $18 million over 20 years.
In the 1970s and 1980s, the NFL solidified its dominance as America's top spectator sport and its important role in American culture. The Super Bowl became an unofficial national holiday and the top-rated TV program most years. Monday Night Football, which first aired in 1970, brought in high ratings by mixing sports and entertainment. Rule changes in the late 1970s ensured a fast-paced game with lots of passing to attract the casual fan.
The founding of the United States Football League in the early 1980s was the biggest challenge to the NFL in the post-merger era. The USFL was a well-financed competitor with big-name players and a national television contract. However, the USFL failed to make money and folded after three years. The USFL filed a successful anti-trust lawsuit against the NFL, but the remedies were minimal, and mismanagement (most notably, a planned move of its niche spring football season to a head-to-head competition in the fall) led to the league's collapse. However, like the AFL before it, the success of the USFL led directly to new NFL teams in Baltimore, Jacksonville, and Phoenix.
In recent years, the NFL has expanded into new markets and ventures. In 1986, the league began holding a series of pre-season exhibition games, called American Bowls, held at international sites outside the United States. Then in 1991, the league formed the World League of American Football, later known as NFL Europe and still later as NFL Europa, a developmental league that had teams in Germany and the Netherlands when the NFL shut it down in June 2007. 2001 saw the rise of the XFL, an attempt by Vince McMahon and NBC, which had lost the NFL broadcast rights for that year, to compete with the league; the XFL folded after just one season. In 2003, the NFL launched its own cable-television channel, NFL Network.
The league played a regular-season NFL game in Mexico City in 2005. On October 28, 2007, a regular season game between the Miami Dolphins and the New York Giants was held outside of North America in Wembley Stadium, a 90,000-seat stadium in London. It was a financial success with nearly 40,000 tickets sold within 90 minutes of the start of sales,[10] and a game-day attendance of over 80,000. On October 26, 2008 the New Orleans Saints and San Diego Chargers will mark the NFL's return to Wembley Stadium.[11] Starting from the 2008-09 season , the Buffalo Bills will play an annual home game in Toronto's Rogers Centre[12].
On August 31, 2007, a story in USA Today unveiled the first changes to the league's shield logo since 1970, which will take effect with the 2008 season.[13] The redesign reduces the number of stars in the logo from 25 (which were found not to have a meaning beyond decorative) to eight (for each of the league's divisions), the logo's football repositioned in the manner of the Vince Lombardi Trophy, and the NFL letters in a straight serifed font (which resembles the current typeface used in other NFL logos). The redesign was created with television and digital media, along with clothing, in mind. The shield logo dates to the 1940s.
In the early years, the league was not stable and teams moved frequently. Franchise mergers were popular during World War II in response to the scarcity of players.
Franchise moves became far more controversial in the late 20th century when a vastly more popular NFL, free from financial instability, allowed many franchises to abandon long-held strongholds for perceived financially greener pastures. While owners invariably cited financial difficulties as the primary factor in such moves, many fans bitterly disputed these contentions, especially in Cleveland (the Rams and the Browns), Baltimore (the Colts), Houston (the Oilers) and St. Louis (the Cardinals), each of which eventually received teams some years after their original franchises left (the Browns, Ravens, Texans and the Rams respectively). However, Los Angeles, the second-largest media market in the United States, has not had an NFL team since 1994 after both the Raiders and the Rams relocated elsewhere.
Additionally, with the increasing suburbanization of the U.S., the building of new stadiums and other team facilities in the suburbs instead of the central city became popular from the 1970s on, though at the turn of the millennium a reverse shift back to the central city became somewhat evident, as with the move by the Detroit Lions from the Silverdome in Pontiac, Michigan to Ford Field in downtown Detroit and, similarly, the Chicago Bears decision to remain in a rebuilt Soldier Field.
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 a 12-team playoff tournament beginning in January, culminating in the Super Bowl in early February. Traditionally, American High school football games are played on Friday, American College football games are played on Saturday, and most NFL games are played on Sunday. Because the NFL season is longer than the college football season, the NFL schedules Saturday games and Saturday playoff games outside the college football Saturdays. The ABC Television network added Monday Night Football in 1970. Thursday night NFL games were added in the 1980s.