National Football League
Current season or competition: 2009 NFL Season
Sport	American Football
Founded	September 17 1920
Commissioner	Roger Goodell
Inaugural season	1922
No. of teams	32
Country	& United States
Most recent champion	Pittsburgh Steelers
Most championships	Green Bay Packers
TV partner	CBS FOX NBC ESPN NFL Network
Official website	NFL.com

The National Football League is the largest Professional Football league in the United States and the largest American Football league in the world. It is an unincorporated 501 association controlled by its members. ¹ It was formed by eleven teams in 1920 as the American Professional Football Association . The league currently consists of thirty-two teams from the United States. The league is divided evenly into two conferences the American Football Conference and National Football Conference and each conference has four divisions that have 4 teams each.

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 teams 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 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. Selected all-star players from both the AFC and NFC meet in the Pro Bowl 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 the week prior to the Super Bowl in Miami Florida.