National Football League playoffs

The National Football League (NFL) playoffs are a single-elimination tournament held after the end of the regular season to determine the NFL champion. Six teams from each of the league's two conferences qualify for the playoffs based on regular season records, and a tie-breaking procedure exists in the case of equal records. The tournament ends with the Super Bowl, the league's championship game, which matches the two conference champions.

NFL postseason history can be traced to the first NFL Championship Game in 1933, though in the early years, qualification for the game was based solely on regular season records. From 1933 to 1966, the NFL postseason generally only consisted of the NFL Championship Game, pitting the league's two division winners (pending any one-game playoff matches that needed to be held to break ties in the division standings). The NFL playoffs then expanded in 1967, when four teams qualified for the tournament. When the league merged with the American Football League (AFL) in 1970, the playoffs expanded to eight teams. The playoffs were expanded to 10 teams in 1978 and 12 teams since 1990.

The NFL is the only one out of the four major professional sports leagues in the United States to use a single-elimination tournament in all four rounds of its playoffs; Major League Baseball (MLB) (not including their wild-card postseason round), the National Basketball Association (NBA), and the National Hockey League (NHL) all use a "best-of" format instead.

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