User:Strongbad/North American Football/The Football Season

In any sport, it's good to know how the seasons work. This chapter describes what happens during a typical football season.

NFL season
Each season in the NFL begins with a preseason. The preseason lasts around four weeks, and most of the teams have to play four games. Some teams play five games during the preseason. These games don't count toward the teams' standings and allow the players to get warmed up.

After the preseason, each team plays a regular season. Normally, every team plays 16 games and has one bye week, which means that it doesn't play during that week. The win-loss-tie record is used to compute a team's standing, where a tie is worth half a win. The teams that do the best in their divisions along with the best two teams among the remaining twelve in each conference(the wild card teams) advance to the playoffs.

The playoff teams are given seeds based on their performance, where the divisional champions have lower seeds than the wild card teams and the best teams in these groups have the lowest seeds in that group. In each game, the lower seed has home field advantage. The highest seeds play the first round, which is called the Wild Card Weekend, and each wild card team must play against a division champion(#3 against #6, #4 against #5). The four remaining teams compete in a single elimination tournament, and the last team in each conference moves on to the Super Bowl. The Pro Bowl is the other postseason bowl game, and the two conferences pick the best players for each position to compete in this game.