2 Playoffs

At the conclusion of each 16-game regular season, six teams from each conference qualify for the playoffs, which culminate in the Super Bowl championship game:

• The four division champions, which are seeded #1 through #4 based on their regular season won-lost-tied record, and
• Two "wild card" qualifiers (those non-division champions with the conference's best won-lost-tied percentages), who are seeded #5 and #6 within the conference.

The #3 and #6 seeded teams, and the #4 and #5 seeded teams, face each other during the playoffs first round, dubbed the "Wild Card Round." The #1 and #2 seeds from each conference do not participate in this round, earning an automatic berth in the following week's "Divisional Playoff" games, where they face the Wild Card survivors. In a given game, whoever has the higher seed gets the home field advantage.

The two surviving teams from the Divisional Playoff games meet in Conference Championship games, with the winners of those contests going on to face one another in the Super Bowl.

3 League Championships

The NFL's method for determing its champions has changed over the years; for the history of the process see National Football League championships.

4 The draft

Many of the USA's college football players want to play in the NFL. There is a highly organized and formal process called the draft (currently consisting of seven rounds) that takes place over two days in April, in which all NFL teams participate. The NFL team with the worst record in the previous year gets first pick of the draft. That is, the team is the first to select a player from a pool of one all eligible college players in the country. The idea is that weak teams can thereby become strengthened over time, in the specialties where they need strengthening. Draft picks continue, in the order from the weakest team to the strongest team, and once all teams have picked one player, they all pick again starting with the weakest team.

Draft picks are frequently traded in advance for players and other draft picks. For example, before the draft occurs, Team A might trade its first-round draft pick plus a certain player (who already plays for Team A) to Team B in exchange for another particular player who already plays for Team B.

Occasionally a player drafted out of college will go right into a "first-string" position as the team's primary player in that position. However, these players usually begin as second- or third-string backups, only playing games if the first-stringer is injured, or if there has been a runaway score and the coach decides to put a backup in the game for a little experience, and to ensure his first-stringer doesn't get injured at the end in a play that is not meaningful to the team.

See List of NFL first overall draft choices

5 Salaries and the salary cap

The minimum salary for an NFL player is $225,000 in his first year, and rises after that based on the number of years in service:

• Year 0: $225,000
• Year 1: $300,000
• Year 2: $375,000
• Year 3: $450,000
• Year 4-6: $525,000
• Year 7-9: $650,000
• Year 10+: $750,000

These numbers are set by contract between the NFL and the players' union, the National Football League Players' Association. These numbers are of course exceeded dramatically by the best players in each position.

Escalating player salaries throughout the 1980s led to the creation of a salary cap, a maximum amount of money each team can pay its players in aggregate. The cap is determined via a complicated formula based on the revenue that all NFL teams receive during the previous year. For the 2004 season, the NFL's salary cap will be approximately $ 80.5 million, an increase of $ 5.5 million from 2003.

Proponents of the salary cap note that it prevents a well-financed team in a major city from simply spending giant amounts of money to secure the very best players in every position and thus dominating the entire sport. This has been seen as a problem in American baseball, among other sports. Proponents also claim that player salaries are out of control, and that fans end up paying higher ticket prices to pay for these salaries. Critics of the salary cap note that the driving reason for the cap was to maximize the profitability of the NFL teams, and limit the power of NFL players to command the high salaries they are said to deserve in exchange for bringing in large numbers of paying fans to the stadiums. They also note that the salary cap could hypothetically drive prospective athletes to other sports that do not cap the salaries of players.

6 Racial policies

Main article: Black players in American professional football

Although the NFL in 2004 is dominated at virtually every position by African-American athletes, that was not always the case. The league had a few black players until 1933, one year after entry to the league of George Preston Marshall. Marshall's policies not only excluded blacks from his Washington Redskins team but may have influenced the entire league to drop blacks until 1946, when pressure from the competing All-America Football Conference induced the NFL to be more liberal in its signing of blacks. Another theory holds that the NFL like most of the United States during the Great Depression would fire black workers before white workers. Still, Marshall refused to sign black players until threatened with civil-rights legal action by the Kennedy administration in 1962. This action, and pressure by another competing league, the more liberal American Football League, slowly managed to reverse the NFL's racial quotas. The American Football League's Denver Broncos were the first modern team to have a black quarterback, Marlin Briscoe , in 1968; and the American Football League's Buffalo Bills were the first to have a black starting quarterback, James Harris, in 1969.

Even after that, for many NFL teams the door would remain closed to black quarterbacks through the 1970s. 1978 Rose Bowl MVP Warren Moon played for six seasons in the CFL before his abilities finally landed him the starting role with the Houston Oilers. It took until 1988 before a black quarterback started for a Super Bowl team, when Doug Williams won it for the Redskins. To this day, the NFL's head-coach hiring policies are questioned, and it has had to institute measures to attempt to have black head-coach candidates be treated more equitably.

7 The NFL on television

The television rights to pro football are the most lucrative (and most expensive) rights of any sport available. In fact, it was television that brought pro football into prominence in the modern era of technology. Since then, NFL broadcasts have become among the most-watched programs on American television, and the fortunes of entire networks have rested on owning NFL broadcasting rights.

7.1 Broadcast era

From the very beginning of the television era, NBC was a prime innovator in football coverage. They were the first major television network to cover an NFL game. In 1939, they televised a game between the Eagles and the Brooklyn football Dodgers. In 1950 the Los Angeles Rams and Washington Redskins televised all their home and road games. The DuMont Network televised the 1951 NFL championship across the entire United States. In 1955 NBC became the televised home to the league championship game. The 1958 championship game played at Yankee Stadium went into sudden death overtime. This game was seen by many through out the country and is credited with increasing the popularity of pro football in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

CBS took over television coverage of the NFL in the mid 1960s, while the AFL was first covered by ABC and then later NBC. Both CBS and NBC televised the first Super Bowl in January 1967. Then, in 1970, the NFL began playing games on Monday night, thus a unique partnership between the NFL and ABC was launched, and the Monday Night Football franchise was born. MNF itself pushed the limits of football coverage with its halftime highlights segment, occasional banter from Howard Cosell and Dennis Miller, and celebrity guests such as John Lennon and President Clinton. Today, Monday Night Football consistently ranks among the most popular primetime broadcasts each week during the NFL season.

Each of the three major networks had their own talent. Announcers such as Cosell, Frank Gifford, and Al Michaels (from ABC); Pat Summerall and John Madden (from CBS); and Curt Gowdy, Dick Enberg, Marv Albert, Jim Simpson , and Jim Lampley (from NBC), all had their own unique analysis of the game. Even the individual networks' football coverage was innovative. For example, CBS' The NFL Today was the first pre-game show to have a female co-hostess, ( Phyllis George); and NBC made history in the 1980s with announcerless football, one-announcer football, and even the first female play-by-play football announcer (which in its own way, set the mold for female sportscasters of today).

The Super Bowls were also ratings blockbusters for the networks that aired it, assuring them of annual ratings victory, and drawing in millions and millions of dollars in advertising.

7.2 Expansion to cable

The middle of the 1980s ushered in the cable era, and in 1987, ESPN became the first cable network to broadcast NFL games. Chris Berman helped redefine the pre- and post-game shows when he launched NFL Countdown and NFL Primetime, and they have since become the top-rated pre- and post-game shows on television. ESPN's contract to show National Football League games on Sunday evenings marked as a turning point for ESPN, transforming it from a smaller cable TV network to a marketing empire.

For a few years in the 1990s, Turner's TNT network broadcast Sunday night games for the first half of the season before ESPN took it over full-time in 1997.

7.3 Broadcast re-alignment

In December 1993, CBS (which had been home to National Conference games for 38 years) lost their rights to the fledging Fox Network. Fox offered a then-record $1.58 billion to the NFL over four years for the rights, significantly more than the $290 million CBS was willing to pay. Fox was only seven years old and had no sports division, but it began building its own coverage by hiring many former CBS personalities such as Summerall and Madden. Fox's NFL rights ownership made the network a major player in American television by giving it many new viewers (and affiliates) and a platform to advertise its other shows. In the meantime, CBS lost several affiliates, and ratings for its other programming languished.

NBC's rebound in the ratings in both the 1980s and 1990s (after years in the bottom of the ratings cellar) were attributed in part to its continuing coverage of the NFL. But with television contract re-negotiations in early 1998 ushering in the era of multi-billion dollar broadcasting agreements, an era of pro football broadcasting would soon came to an unceremonious conclusion. CBS, stung by Fox's surprise bid four years earlier, aggressively sought to reacquire some broadcasting rights. CBS agreed to pay $4 billion over eight years ($500 million per season) to air American Conference games. NBC, meanwhile, had indicated a desire to bid for Monday Night Football rights in 1998, but gave up when the financial stakes skyrocketed. And so, after six decades, NBC, the network that helped define pro football on television, lost its rights to air the NFL, thus marking the beginning of a slow (and continuing) decline for the Peacock network's sports division.

Fox extended its National Conference deal by agreeing to a $4.4 billion contract ($550 million per season), which included rights to half the Super Bowls during that time. Meanwhile, ABC retained its longtime rights to Monday Night Football by also paying $4.4 billion over eight years. ESPN agreed to a $4.8 billion ($600 million a season) deal to become the sole cable broadcaster of NFL games. All the eight-year deals last through the 2005 season.

7.4 NFL broadcasting today

Today, despite annual financial losses, CBS continues its position as the prime network for NFL football (with its American Conference package), although Fox continues to air National Conference games, ESPN still airs Sunday night games, and ABC has its Monday Night Football franchise. The current NFL television contract ends with the 2005 season, and negotiations for new contracts have already begun. As of November 9, 2004, both Fox and CBS have renewed their broadcast rights through 2011, while the Sunday and Monday night packages remain up for grabs, perhaps opening the door for the return of pro football to NBC. The cost of television rights is expected to continue to rise.

The style of pro football broadcasting is ever changing, with its female hostesses/sideline reporters, visual first-down markers, advanced graphics, and new multi-camera angles, all of which will carry football telecasts into the new century.

7.5 NFL Network and NFL Films

In 2003 the NFL launched its own specialty channel, the NFL Network. The new channel's coverage focuses on the NFL (as would be expected), although it will also be used to screen Canadian Football League games as per the terms of a working agreement with the CFL that was renewed in 2004.

NFL Films , which provides game films to media outlets for highlight shows, is owned by the NFL.

The NFL's status as a prime offering by the networks has led some to conclude that unbiased coverage of the league is not possible. ESPN attempted to run a dramatic series showing seamier aspects of the NFL, but dropped the series after the league threatened to exclude the network from carrying its games. "NFL Films", though technically superb, with stunning action shots, essentially produces commercials for the NFL.

8 Commissioners and presidents of the NFL

1. President Jim Thorpe ( 1920- 1921)
2. President Joseph Carr (1921- 1939)
3. President Carl Storck (1939- 1941)
4. Commissioner Elmer Layden (1941- 1946)
5. Commissioner Bert Bell (1946- 1959)
6. Interim President Austin Gunsel (1959- 1960, following death of Bell)
7. Commissioner Alvin "Pete" Rozelle (1960- 1989)
8. Commissioner Paul Tagliabue ( 1989-present)

9 League offices

• Canton, OH (1920-1921)
• Columbus, OH (1921-1941)
• Chicago, IL (1941-1946)
• Philadelphia, PA (1946-1960)
• New York, NY (1960-present)

10 Players

• List of American football players

11 See also

• NFL Europe
• List of Professional Football Drafts
• American Football League
• Defunct NFL teams
• All-Star games
• Pro Football Hall of Fame
• Professional Football Championship Games
• List of leagues of American football
• NFL Annual Rushing Leaders

12 References

• "NFL Scores Nearly $18 Billion in TV Rights", by Stefan Fatsis and Kyle Pope, 01/14/1998, The Wall Street Journal (p. B1) [1]

13 External links

• NFL website
• NFL History - Champion and Award Lists
• Dr. Eric Tulsky's Thoughts on Football
• NFL Finals

American football leagues National Football League

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