The American football season can seem almost like trying to interpret hieroglyphics to the uninitiated, such is the confusing nature of things to those that don’t know much about the sport. It is known as the ‘Regular Season’ and consists of 272 games that are played across an 18-week period.
Although there is no point in giving specific dates on account of the fact that they change with such regularity, we can tell you that they get underway on the weekend after the first Monday in September and tend to come to a close early in January, before the playoffs begin.
A Brief History of the NFL Season
During the more formative years of the National Football League, there was no set schedule for games. Teams could end up playing as few as eight games or as many as 16, often going up against college and amateur sides as well as independent professional ones. Between 1926 and 1946, teams would play between 11 and 14 games, as dictated by the number of teams that made up the league. In 1947, each team began playing 12 games a season, which remained the case until 1960. The launch of the American Football League in 1960 saw a schedule of 14 games introduced.
In 1961, the NFL decided to follow suit with a 14-game schedule, which remained the case until 1977, with the exception of in 1966 when there were an odd number of franchises. Two exhibition games were brought in in 1978, expanding the season by two games, which remained the case until 1989. A bye-week had been used at times and was reintroduced in 1990, allowing each team to play 16 times across a 17-week schedule, resulting in the opening weekend being moved to Labor Day weekend.
How the Current Season Works
Since 2002, there has been a nationally televised regular season game played on the Thursday night after Labor Day. That typically tends to involve the defending Super Bowl champions as a way of kick-starting the defence of their title and it means that the earliest the season can begin is the fourth of September and the latest is the tenth of September, depending on which day the first of September falls upon. Because of rules that say that games cannot take place at the same time as high school or college games, there are five time slots for games to kick off at.
Generally speaking, games tend to take place on a Sunday, with some games played on Monday night and Saturday night, with some played on Thursday and some on a Friday. It is when it comes to the scheduling of games that people tend to get a little bit confused, largely on account of the fact that there are eight divisions with four teams in each, yet each team in the NFL plays 17 games during the course of the regular season. That is because the following formula is used:
- Each team played the other teams in its division twice
- Each team also plays once against each of the four teams in another division within its own conference
- Each team plays once against a team from the other two divisions within its conference, based on their standings from the previous season for an additional two games
- Each team plays each of the four teams from one division in the other conference
- Each team also plays an additional inter-conference game against one team from the division in the conference that it played two years prior, with the team needing to have finished in a similar position in the previous season’s final standings
Thankfully, all of this is worked out by a computer algorithm. It means that all teams will play every other team in their conference at least once during a three-year period, as well as every team in the other conference across a four-year period. It also means that each team in a division will have a similar schedule to the other teams in the conference.
The Post-Season
.jpg){kind=link}
The entire point of the regular season is to determine where each team ends up in the American Football Conference and the National Football Conference come the end of it. From there, the top four teams in each division as well as an additional three Wild Cards qualify for the post-season. The National Football League playoffs are used to determine who will end up as the league champion, seeing a four-round tournament held in a single-elimination fashion. The top team from each Conference is given a bye past the first round.
For the first three rounds of the playoffs, the teams only go up against sides from their own Conference. This is done in order to discover a team that will represent the AFC and a team that will represent the NFC, which will then go into the Super Bowl to determine the overall best team in the NFL for that season. Typically speaking, the first round will pit the wild card teams against the division winners that didn’t come top of the overall Conference, whilst the second round will see the teams matched up according to their seeding. The third round does the same.