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.

NFL players are all members of a union called the National Football League Players Association (NFLPA). The NFLPA negotiates the general minimum contract for all players in the league.

The season concludes with a 12-team tournament used to determine the teams to play in the Super Bowl. The tournament brackets are made up of six teams from each of the league's two conferences, the American Football Conference (AFC) and the National Football Conference (NFC), following the end of the 16-game regular season:

The television rights to the NFL are the most lucrative and expensive rights not only of any American sport, but of any American entertainment property.

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 team's divisional rivals, as well as several inter-division and inter-conference games.

While baseball is known as "America's national pastime", football is the most popular sport in the United States. According to the Harris Poll, professional football moved ahead of baseball as the fans' favorite in 1965 and has remained America's favorite sport ever since.

The Golden Arm and often called Johnny U, was a professional American football player in the 1950s through the 1970s, spending the majority of his career with the Baltimore Colts. He was a record-setting quarterback and the National Football League's most valuable player in 1959, 1964 and 1967.

While baseball is known as "America's national pastime", football is the most popular sport in the United States. According to the Harris Poll, professional football moved ahead of baseball as the fans' favorite in 1965 and has remained America's favorite sport ever since.

John Earl Madden (born April 10, 1936) is a former National Football League player, a former head coach with the Oakland Raiders, a football video game magnate and is considered one of the top broadcast analysts for NFL games. In 2006, he was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in recognition of his coaching career.