NFL American Football Tickets
The National Football League, NFL, is the world’s largest professional American football league. It was formed, as the American Professional Football Association, in 1920 with 11 teams. Further teams have joined over the years and the league, which changed its name in 1922, now consists of 32 teams, all based in the USA. Two of the founder members, the Chicago Cardinals, now the Arizona Cardinals, and the Decatur Staleys, now the Chicago Bears, are still in existence. The Green Bay Packers, founded in 1919, are the oldest team to still play in the same location, but did not join the league until 1921.
Buy NFL American Football Tickets
The NFL is divided into 2 conferences, the American Football Conference, AFC, and National Football Conference, NFC. Each conference consists of 4 divisions, each comprising 4 teams. The NFL season is played over seventeen weeks, from the beginning of September to the end of December. Each team plays 16 games, with one bye week. The NFL fixture schedule is complicated and it is probably easier to look up an official NFL schedule at the start of the season than work out a team’s fixtures in advance. However, for those with masochistic tendencies, the rules for working out a team’s NFL season are as follows:
1. Each team plays the other three teams in its division twice, once at home, and once away, ie. 6 games.
2. Each team plays the four teams from another division within its own conference once on a rotating 3-year cycle, two at home and two on the road, ie. 4 games.
3. Each team plays the four teams from a division in the other conference once on a rotating 4-year cycle, two at home and two on the road, ie. 4 games.
4. Each team plays once against the other teams in its conference that finished in the same place in their own divisions the previous season, discounting the division they were already scheduled to play, once at home and once on the road, ie. 2 games.
Phew!
American Football Playoffs and Superbowl
When the regular season is completed, six teams from each conference qualify to contest the NFL playoffs, culminating in the Championship game, known as the Super Bowl. In each conference, the six teams are made up of the 4 divisional winners, plus the 2 best runners-up in that conference, who are given wild card entries into the playoffs. Based on their regular season records, the 6 teams are seeded; the divisional champions are numbers 1 to 4 and the wild card teams numbers 5 and 6.
The top 2 ranked teams receive byes in the first round of playoff games, with the 3rd seeded team playing the 6th seeds and the 4th seeds playing the 5th seeds. In the second round, the no.1 seed play the lowest surviving seeds, while the no.2 seeds play the other winners from the first round. The winners of these games meet in the Conference Championship game. NB. In all playoff matches the higher-seeded team is awarded home field advantage. The winners of the AFC and NFC Conference Championship games face each other in the Super Bowl, played at a neutral venue.
Of 42 Super Bowls played as of 2009, 25 have been played in one of three locations, with New Orleans hosting the Championship game 9 times, the Greater Miami area 9 times and the Greater Los Angeles area 7 times. Other multiple hosts are Tampa, Florida which hosted its 4th Super Bowl in February 2009 and San Diego with 3 Super Bowls.
NFL Tickets
Tickets for NFL games can be difficult to obtain, due to the great popularity of the sport and the fact that each team only plays 8 home games per season. The most reliable sources of NFL tickets are the clubs themselves. The league’s official website, NFL.com has a ticket section, which provides links to the official sites of all 32 teams. Tickets prices and availability vary widely, dependent on which teams are involved. For 2009, tickets range in price from around $60 up to several thousand for the very best seats. NFL.com also provides an official NFL-approved Ticket Exchange, allowing fans to buy tickets directly from other fans. This is a safe, legitimate method of obtaining tickets for sold-out games. Tickets are delivered in a timely manner, by e-mail. Several fans have noted that this to be a good way of securing last-minute bargains.
Buy NFL American Football Tickets
