Confusing American Football

At the time of writing, it is Sunday morning January 4th, the day the Philadelphia Eagles play their first game in the end of season play-offs. I have just heard that they will be playing the Minnesota Vikings, in Minnesota where the early morning temperature is minus 6 F but it will warm up to 6 F for the game. To put that in context, the current temperature up there is current minus 21 degrees Celsius, but it will 'warm up' to minus 14 Celsius. Fortunately the game will be played in “The Dome” which is fully enclosed, meaning that the air temperature inside will probably be as high as 20 degrees F (minus 6 Celsius).

I have been doing a little research on how the American Football teams are organised. It seems the teams can be split into the two conferences, the American Football Conference (AFC) and the National Football Conference (NFC). Each conference is then split into four Divisions, e.g. AFC North, AFC East, AFC West and AFC South. The same system applies to the NFC. Quite how the teams are split up I do not know as for example, the New York Giants are in the NFC whilst the New York Jets are in the AFC.

The teams can also be viewed in a league format which sets out their relative performances indicating where they stand with respect to each other. Having said that, each team plays other teams in their conference, but with 16 teams in each conference, they obviously do not play every team as they only play 12 games during the regular season. I have no idea how that is sorted! You can also view the teams by conference to see where they stand in their respective conference.

All the division winners all go through to the play-offs, along with what looks like 4 other teams. In what is called the Wild Card round the wild card winners all play division winners, but some division winners get a bye to the following round (no idea why, can only presume they had a better win lose ration through the regular season). The next week is the Divisional Round where the winners from the Wild Card round play the remaining division winners. The winners of this round go on to the Championship round where the winners of each conference are decided. The winners of this round then meet in the Super Bowl.

Makes the English Premier League look simple in comparison. But there again, add in the F.A. Cup, the League Cup, the UEFA Cup and the Champions League, not forgetting of course the Intertoto Cup, the European Super Cup and the FIFA World Club Cup, to say nothing of the International competitions, and I suppose it would also seem confusing to anyone trying to understand that system.