NFL Football Clothing Store | NFL Football Clothing

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NFL - NATIONAL FOOTBALL LEAGUE

The National Football League (NFL) is the largest professional American football league in the world. 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 of thirty-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.

The regular season is a seventeen-week schedule during which each team has one bye week and plays sixteen games. Teams play all three other teams in their division twice. They also play each team from one other division in their conference, and each team from the same division in the opposite conference. The final two games come against the teams who finished in the same place the previous season in the two divisions of their conference not previously played. 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. Commercials during the Super Bowl tend to be quite popular among the general public. Selected all-star players from both the AFC and NFC meet in the Pro Bowl, previously held in Honolulu, Hawaii; up to and including 2009, this game took place the weekend after the Super Bowl. In 2010, it will take place a week prior to the Super Bowl, in Miami Gardens, Florida.

The National Football League was the idea of legendary American Indian Olympic athlete Jim Thorpe, player-coach of the Canton Bulldogs, and Leo Lyons, owner of the Rochester Jeffersons, a sandlot football team. Both the Jeffersons and the Buffalo All-Stars were barnstorming through Ohio at the time. After Lyons's Jeffersons played, and lost badly to, Thorpe's Bulldogs in a 1917 match, Lyons (wanting to build a sport that rivaled Major League Baseball in popularity) suggested to Thorpe that a league be formed. Plans could not be initiated immediately in 1918, due to the Spanish flu quarantines and the loss of players to World War I, which led to the Bulldogs suspending operations and most other teams either suspending operations or reducing their schedules to local teams.

The next year, however, Lyons started in his home state of New York, challenging a cluster of professional teams in Buffalo to a championship in 1919; the Buffalo ProspectsOhio League, which included teams such as the Bulldogs, the Massillon Tigers, the Shelby Blues and the Ironton Tanks; Thorpe convinced Bulldogs manager Ralph Hay and other Ohio teams to play under a league-style format for 1919, after which the team barnstormed against the Detroit Heralds of Detroit, Michigan and the Hammond Pros of Chicago, Illinois. Other independent clusters of teams were playing at about the same time across Illinois, Wisconsin, Minnesota and Indiana; Pennsylvania and New York City also had teams but did not contribute any to the NFL at the time of its founding. This is especially notable since Pennsylvania is often considered to be the birthplace of professional football; at the time, Pennsylvania's blue laws prevented any of that state's teams from joining the league until 1924.