national football league
Posted by admin | Posted in Baseball | Posted on 08-07-2009-05-2008
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In order to promote football as a professional American game and to regulate teams, the owners of 11 football teams across the USA formed a professional football association in 1920. This was the precursor to What we know today as the National Football League, or more commonly, the NFL. The original name of the association was the American Professional Football Association, which later was changed to the American Football League in 1921 and finally to the NFL in 1922.
There are two divisions of the National Football League, the AFC (American Football Conference) and the NFC (National Football Conference). Each conference has four divisions with 4 teams in each division. The purpose of the National Football League is to set up each teams schedule against the other teams to reach a playoff and ultimately the annual Super Bowl.
Each team is on a 17-week schedule, where they will play 16 games against teams in their conference each week and have one week off. The regular season normally begins on the first Thursday after Labor Day (September 1) and will end in late December or early January. When the regular schedule is completed, the top 6 teams from each conference will face off in the playoff tournaments to determine the top two teams. The top two teams from the playoffs that will then face off in the Super Bowl.
In addition to the schedules and the administration of professional football, the National Football League also promotes and owns all rights to the Super Bowl, including picking the host stadium for the annual event. That task is accomplished through a bidding process in which a host city will make a proposal to the National Football League for the Super Bowl to be held in their city.
The National Football League has strict requirements for Host cities, one of which is the seating capacity of the stadium. This is the reason many cities have built or rebuilt their stadiums in recent years. Another consideration is the impact the super Bowl will have on the area. For example, when Jacksonville hosted their first Super Bowl in 2005 (Super Bowl XXXIX), they had several problems that put a strain on local resources, one of which was the enormous amount of people using the public bathrooms that caused an unanticipated strain on the local wastewater plant.
Although occassionally such problems may arise, the National Football League has been the driving force behind making football a great American pastime in the same respect as America’s other favorite sport of Baseball.
