NFL Rules & Regulations to Determine a Playoff Schedule

Each year, the best teams in the National Football League compete in a playoff that concludes with the Super Bowl, the league's championship game. In 2010, six teams from each conference---the American Football Conference (AFC) and the National Football Conference (NFC)--- will participate in a single-elimination tournament to determine each conference's representative in the Super Bowl. Each season's playoff teams and schedule are determined by established league rules.

  1. Regular Season

    • In 2010, each of the NFL's 32 teams play a 16-game regular season schedule over a 17-week span that begins in September and ends the first weekend in January. Each team has a mandatory week off (called a "bye week") that falls anywhere between weeks 4 and 10 of the regular season. During the opening weekend of the playoffs, which begin the weekend following the conclusion of the regular season, only eight of the 12 teams play, while the top two teams in each conference receive a bye.

    Qualifying

    • Each conference contains four divisions: North, South, East and West. Winners of each division, based on overall record, earn an automatic berth in the playoffs. The remaining four teams qualify based on overall records and enter the playoff field as wild-card teams. Once the 12-team playoff field is determined, division-winning teams are seeded Nos. 1 through 4, based on overall record, and wild card teams are seeded No. 5 or 6, based on overall record. Home-field advantage goes to the higher-seeded team.

    Playoffs

    • The opening round of the NFL playoffs is nicknamed "Wild Card Weekend," as all four wild card teams are in action against the four division-winning teams that did not earn a first-round bye. In each conference, the lower-seeded wild card team faces the No. 3 seed division winner, while the higher-seeded wild card team takes on the No. 4 seed division winner. Winners of each game advance to the second round to face the top two seeds from each conference. The top-seeded division winner will play against the lowest-seeded team, while the No. 2 seed will play the other remaining team. Again, the higher-seeded team gets the home-field advantage.

    Tiebreakers

    • In the event of a tie in team standings, the NFL has established tiebreaking rules to determine playoff qualifiers. Tiebreakers for determining division champions and wild card teams include head-to-head competition, best won-lost-tied percentage against teams within the division, and best won-lost-tied percentage against common opponents, to name a few. In all, there are 12 tiebreaking rules that conclude with a coin toss if all 11 of the other tiebreaking rules do not resolve the issue.

    The Super Bowl

    • The Super Bowl is played on the first Sunday in February, two weeks following the conference championship games. Conference champion teams face off in the league's championship game.