National Football League

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National Football League
Current season or competition: 2008 NFL season
Sport	American football
Founded	1920
Commissioner	Roger Goodell
No. of teams	32, divided into two sixteen-team conferences, each of which consists of four four-team divisions.
Country(ies)	United States
Most recent champion(s)	New York Giants
Most championships	Green Bay Packers (12)
TV partner(s)	CBS, FOX, NBC, ESPN, NFL Network
Official website	NFL.com

The National Football League (NFL) is the largest professional American football league. 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 Poll conducted in 2008, the NFL was the favorite sport of nearly as many people (30%) as the combined total of the next four professional sports--baseball (15%), auto racing (10%), hockey (5%), and men’s pro basketball (4%). ^[2] Additionally, football's American TV viewership ratings now surpass those of other sports. ^[3] Furthermore, college football is actually the third-most popular sport in the US, with 12% of survey respondents listing it as their favorite. Therefore, fully 42% of Americans consider some level of football their favorite sport.

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 (162-game scheduled regular season).