American sports

The National Football League

The National Football League (NFL) is the largest professional American football league, consisting of thirty-two teams from American cities and regions. The league was formed in 1920 as the American Professional Football Association, which adopted the name "National Football League" in 1922. The NFL is one of the major professional sports leagues of North America.

Prior to the 1960s, the most popular version of American football was played collegiately. After the 1958 NFL Championship Game (which went into overtime), the NFL's greatest spurt in popularity came in the 1960s and 1970s with the merger of the rival American Football League, or AFL (1960-1969). The AFL introduced major on- and off-the-field innovations that were eventually adopted by the NFL.

Currently, the league's 32 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.

During the league's regular season, each team plays 16 games over a 17-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 12-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. One week later, selected all-star players from both the AFC and NFC meet in the Pro Bowl, currently held in Hawaii.

In recent decades, the regular season had traditionally started on Labor Day Weekend and lasted through Christmas week. However, declining television ratings on Labor Day have pushed the start of the regular season ahead one week. This is where scheduling currently stands, with the first game of the season being played on the Thursday after Labor Day (the remaining Week 1 games are played three to four days later).

1. Regular season

The NFL season begins with most teams playing four "pre-season" exhibition games from early August through early September. Two "featured" exhibition games, the Pro Football Hall of Fame Game and American Bowl, don't count toward the normal allottment of four games, so the four teams playing in those games each end up playing five exhibition games.

The regular season starts the weekend after Labor Day. Each team plays 16 games during a 17-week period. Traditionally, every game is played on Sunday afternoon with the exception of one game per week being played in Sunday night, and another game being played on Monday night. In recent years, the league has started scheduling a nationally telecast regular season game on the Thursday night prior to the first Sunday of NFL games to "kickoff" the season.

In addition, the Dallas Cowboys and the Detroit Lions each host a game on Thanksgiving Day. For the last three weeks or so of the regular season, after the end of the college football season, the league typically schedules two or three nationally televised games on Saturday afternoons or evenings.

In 2005, with Christmas falling on a Sunday, the NFL has flipped their normal schedule for that weekend, having the normal slate (less the Sunday night contest) of Sunday games on Saturday (Christmas Eve day), with two nationally televised games on Sunday (Christmas Day), similar to what the NFL did in 1994 with the afternoon games on Saturday, and the primetime games the following two days (Detroit at Miami on Sunday, San Francisco at Minnesota on Monday).

Currently, each team's regular season schedule is set using a pre-determined formula:

• Each team plays every other team in their division twice: once at home, and once on the road (six games).
• Each team plays the four teams from another division within its conference on a rotating three-year cycle: two at home, and two on the road (four games).
• Each team plays the four teams from a division in the other conference on a rotating four-year cycle: two at home, and two on the road (four games).
• Each team plays two games versus two teams within its conference based on the prior year's standings. These games match a first-place team against the first-place teams in the two same-conference divisions the team is not scheduled to play that season. The second-place, third-place, and fourth-place teams in a conference are matched in the same way each year: one at home, and one on the road.

This formula has been regarded as very successful, rekindling old rivalries while starting new ones, as teams will play in each other's stadiums eventually, which makes for a more consistent and attractive schedule each year.

For the 2005 season, the assignments are the following:

Intraconference	Interconference
AFC East v. AFC West	AFC East v. NFC South
AFC North v. AFC South	AFC North v. NFC North
NFC East v. NFC West	AFC South v. NFC West
NFC North v. NFC South	AFC West v. NFC East

For the 2006 season, the assignments will be:

Intraconference	Interconference
AFC East v. AFC South	AFC East v. NFC North
AFC North v. AFC West	AFC North v. NFC South
NFC East v. NFC South	AFC South v. NFC East
NFC North v. NFC West	AFC West v. NFC West

2. Playoffs

At the conclusion of each 16-game regular season, six teams from each conference qualify for the playoffs, a single-elimination tournament, which culminates in the Super Bowl:

• The four division champions from each conference (the team in each division with the best regular season won-lost-tied record), which are seeded one through four based on their regular season won-lost-tied record.
  
• Two wild card qualifiers (those non-division champions with the conference's best won-lost-tied percentages), which are seeded five and six.

The third and the sixth seeded teams, and the fourth and the fifth seeds, face each other during the first round of the playoffs, dubbed the Wild Card Round. The first and the second seeds from each conference receive a bye in the first round, which entitles these teams to automatically advance to the second round, the Divisional Playoff games to face the Wild Card survivors. In any given playoff round, the highest surviving seed always plays the lowest surviving seed. And in any given playoff game, whoever has the higher seed gets the home field advantage (i.e. the game is held at the higher seed's home field).

The two surviving teams from the Divisional Playoff games meet in Conference Championship games, with the winners of those contests going on to face one another in the Super Bowl.

The terms "Wild Card Round" and "Divisional Playoffs" originated from the playoff format that was used before 1990. During that time, three division winners and two wild card teams from each conference qualified for the playoffs. Only the wild card teams played during the first round, while all of the division winners received a bye, automatically advancing to the second round.

A major disadvantage that critics cite in the current system is that a divisional winner could host a playoff game against a wild card team that earned a better regular season record. For example, the Tennessee Titans finished the 2003 regular season with a 12-4 record, but only qualified as a wild card team and thus had to face the Baltimore Ravens, the AFC North division champions with a 10-6 record, in Baltimore, Maryland.

3. Tiebreaking rules

The league uses a set of rules to break ties in the final season standings, i.e. teams that have the same regular season won-lost-tied record. As mentioned above, each team's order of finish in their respective divisions (first-place, second-place, etc.) determine the opponents in two of their games during the following season. The tiebreaking rules are also used to help determine playoff seedings and the order in which teams pick in the NFL draft.

The process basically involves comparing a set of each team's season statistics, one record at a time, until one club has a higher value than the others.

The first criterion that is always compared first is head-to-head, how the tied teams fared when they played each other during the regular season.

Other data that is then compared include their record against teams in their division, their record against teams in their conference, their record against common opponents, net points scored, and net touchdowns scored.

If the teams remain tied after comparing all of these statistics, then the tie is broken using a coin toss. To date, a coin toss has never been used by the league to break a tie.

4. The draft

Many of the USA's college football players want to play in the NFL. There is a highly organized and formal process called the draft (currently consisting of seven rounds) that takes place over two days in April, in which all NFL teams participate. The NFL team with the worst record in the previous year gets first pick of the draft.

That is, the team is the first to select a player from a pool of all eligible college players in the country. The idea is that weak teams can thereby become strengthened over time, in the specialties where they need strengthening. Draft picks continue, in the order from the weakest team to the strongest team, and once all teams have picked one player, they all pick again starting with the weakest team.

Draft picks are frequently traded in advance for players and other draft picks. For example, before the draft occurs, Team A might trade its first-round draft pick plus a certain player (who already plays for Team A) to Team B in exchange for another particular player who already plays for Team B.

Occasionally a player drafted out of college will go right into a "first-string" position as the team's primary player in that position. However, these players usually begin as second- or third-string backups, only playing games if the first-stringer is injured, or if there has been a runaway score and the coach decides to put a backup in the game for a little experience, and to ensure his first-stringer does not get injured at the end in a play that is not meaningful to the team.

5. Salaries and the salary cap

The minimum salary for an NFL player is $230,000 in his first year, and rises after that based on the number of years in service. Exhibition game minimum is $10,000. These numbers are set by contract between the NFL and the players' union, the National Football League Players' Association. These numbers are of course exceeded dramatically by the best players in each position.

Escalating player salaries throughout the 1980s and the advent of free agency in 1992 led to the NFL's adoption of a salary cap in 1994, a maximum amount of money each team can pay its players in aggregate. The cap is determined via a complicated formula based on the revenue that all NFL teams receive during the previous year. For the 2004 season, the NFL's salary cap was $80.582 million, an increase of $5.5 million from 2003. The cap for the 2005 season is expected to be approximately $85.5 million.

Proponents of the salary cap note that it prevents a well-financed team in a major city from simply spending giant amounts of money to secure the very best players in every position and thus dominating the entire sport. This has been seen as a problem in American baseball, long dominated since the advent of free agency by large market teams.

They point to the relative parity of competition that exists in the NFL as of 2005 compared to Major League Baseball as evidence that the NFL salary cap preserves competitive balance. They claim fans end up paying higher ticket prices to help pay for escalating player salaries. These concerns, among others, led in part to modified salary cap adoption in the National Basketball Association in 1984 and the National Hockey League in 2005.

Critics of the salary cap note that the driving reason for the cap was to maximize the profitability of the NFL teams, and limit the power of NFL players to command the high salaries they are said to deserve in exchange for bringing in large numbers of paying fans to the stadiums. They also note that the salary cap could hypothetically drive prospective athletes to other sports that do not cap the salaries of players; furthermore, they attribute NFL competitive parity instead to the league's extensive revenue sharing policies.

The NFL's current CBA (collective bargaining agreement) expires in 2008.

6. Racial policies

Although the current NFL is well-represented at virtually every position by African-American athletes, that was not always the case. The league had a few black players until 1933, one year after entry to the league of George Preston Marshall.Marshall's policies not only excluded blacks from his Washington Redskins team but may have influenced the entire league to drop blacks until 1946, when pressure from the competing All-America Football Conference induced the NFL to be more liberal in its signing of blacks.

Another theory holds that the NFL, like most of the United States during the Great Depression, simply fired black workers before white workers, but this could hardly account for the league's apparent "all-white" policy during this period. Still, Marshall refused to sign black players until threatened with civil rights legal action by the Kennedy administration in 1962, in which it was explained to him that his lease on the then-new D.C. Stadium, which was at the time controlled by the United States Department of the Interior, would be voided if he continued to refuse to sign any black players.

This action, and pressure by another competing league, the more racially-liberal American Football League, slowly managed to reverse the NFL's racial quotas. The AFL's Denver Broncos were the first modern-era team to have a black starting quarterback, Marlin Briscoe, who started the fourth game of the 1968 season, and broke pro football rookie records for passing yardage and touchdowns.

The next year 1969, another American Football League team, the Buffalo Bills were the first professional football team of the modern era to begin the season with a black, James Harris as their starting quarterback. The Chicago Bears had a black quarterback in 1953, Willie Thrower, who played in only one game and did not start in any games. After that, no old-line NFL team had a black starting quarterback until the Steelers' Joe Gilliam in 1972.

Even after that, for many NFL teams the door would remain closed to black quarterbacks through the 1970s. 1978 Rose Bowl MVP Warren Moon played for six seasons in the CFL before his abilities finally landed him the starting role with the Houston Oilers. It took until 1988 before a black quarterback started for a Super Bowl team, when Doug Williams won it for the Redskins. To this day, the NFL's head-coach hiring policies are questioned, and it has had to institute measures to attempt to have black head coach candidates be treated more equitably.

White skill players have become increasingly rare in the modern NFL, as most positions are filled by blacks. White running backs, defensive backs, and receivers have become less and less common over the last 25 years. In 2005, a slim majority of offensive linemen are white, while no whites are listed as Tailbacks or Cornerbacks on NFL rosters.

Most quarterbacks, punters, and kickers are white, while almost all running backs, wide receivers, defensive backs, defensive linemen, safeties, punt returners, and kickoff returners are black. Increasingly, positions such as tight end, fullback, and linebacker are being filled by blacks. In the early 1980s, blacks and whites each made up roughly half of the players. Since then, the percentage of black players has increased steadily to its present 2005 level of 69%. Whites make up the majority of the remaining players, followed by Pacific Islanders, Hispanics, and Asians.

7. Television

The television rights to pro football are the most lucrative (and most expensive) rights of any sport available. In fact, it was television that brought pro football into prominence in the modern era of technology. Since then, NFL broadcasts have become among the most-watched programs on American television, and the fortunes of entire networks have rested on owning NFL broadcasting rights.