About National Football League

The National Football League (NFL) is the highest level of professional American football in the United States. It was formed by eleven teams in 1920 as the American Professional Football Association, with the league changing its name to the National Football League in 1922. The league currently consists of thirty-two teams from the United States. The league is divided evenly into two conferences — the American Football Conference (AFC) and National Football Conference (NFC), and each conference has four divisions that have four teams each, for a total of 16 teams in each conference. The NFL is organized as an unincorporated 501 association, a federal nonprofit designation for tax-exempt professional football leagues, comprised of its 32 teams. The NFL is by far the most attended domestic sports league in the world by average attendance per game, with 67,509 fans per game in the latest regular season (2009).
The regular season is a seventeen-week schedule during which each team plays sixteen games and has one bye week. The season currently starts on the Thursday night in the first full week of September (the Thursday after Labor Day) and runs weekly to late December or early January. At the end of each regular season, six teams from each conference (at least one from each division) play in the NFL playoffs, a twelve-team single-elimination tournament that culminates with the championship game, known as the Super Bowl. This game is held at a pre-selected site which is usually a city that hosts an NFL team.


Calendar

Though the NFL only plays in the late summer, fall, and early winter, the extended offseason often is an event in itself, with the draft, free agency signings, and the announcement of schedules keeping the NFL in the spotlight even during the spring, when virtually no on-field activity is taking place. A typical calendar of league events is as follows, with the dates listed being those for the 2010 NFL season:
February 22 – Pro Football Hall of Fame Game opponents announced.
February 24–March 2—NFL Scouting Combine: Lucas Oil Stadium, Indianapolis, Ind.
February 25—Deadline for Clubs to designate Franchise and Transition players.
March 5—Veteran Free Agency signing period begins. Trading period begins.
March 21–24—NFL Annual Meeting: Dana Point, Calif. Usually accompanied by announcement of scheduling and opponents for first game and opening-weekend night games.
Early April: Teams begin voluntary workouts.
April 20: 2010 schedule announced.
April 22–24 – NFL Draft: New York City.
May 24–26—NFL Spring Meeting: Fort Lauderdale, Fla.
June 27 – June 30—NFL Rookie Symposium, Palm Beach Gardens, Fla.
Mid-July (varies by team)-- Training camps open.
August 7 – Pro Football Hall of Fame Induction Ceremony, Canton, Ohio, including Hall of Fame Game.
August 12–16—First full Preseason weekend.
August 31—Roster cutdown from 80 to maximum of 75 players.
September 4—Roster cutdown from 75 to maximum of 53 players.
September 9–13 – Kickoff 2010 Weekend (Week 1 of regular season)
October 31 – International Series game (Wembley Stadium, London).
November – Pro Bowl balloting, flexible scheduling for Sunday Night Football and the NFL Network's night game package all begin.
November 25 – Thanksgiving games.
January 2, 2011—End of regular season.
January 8, 2011 – Playoffs begin.
January 23 – AFC Championship Game and NFC Championship Game.
January 30 – Pro Bowl.
February 6 – Super Bowl.

Current NFL teams

The NFL consists of thirty-two clubs. Each club is allowed a maximum of fifty-three players on their roster, but they may only dress forty-five to play each week during the regular season. Unlike Major League Baseball, Major League Soccer, the National Basketball Association and the National Hockey League, the league has no full-time teams in Canada, although the Buffalo Bills play one game per year in Toronto. Most teams are in the eastern half of the United States; seventeen teams are in the Eastern Time Zone and nine others in the Central Time Zone.
Most major metropolitan areas in the United States have an NFL franchise, although Los Angeles, the second-largest metropolitan area in the country, has not hosted an NFL team since 1994.
The Rams and the Raiders called the Los Angeles area home from 1946–1994 and 1982–1994 respectively. In 2005, some Saints games were played in San Antonio and Baton Rouge because of Hurricane Katrina. Also, there is talk of possibly bringing the NFL to Toronto, the largest city of Canada. The most frequently mentioned team for such a move is the aforementioned Buffalo Bills, who play 90 miles (140 km) south in Buffalo, play some of their games in Toronto's Rogers Centre, and are owned by a man now in his nineties (Ralph Wilson) who has no apparent plans to keep the team in his family upon his death.
The Dallas Cowboys are the highest valued American football franchise, valued at approximately $1.6 billion and one of the most valuable franchises in all of professional sports worldwide, currently second only to English Football club Manchester United, which has an approximate value of $1.8 billion at current exchange rates.



Player contracts and compensation

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. This contract is called the Collective Bargaining Agreement (CBA), and it is the central document that governs the negotiation of individual player contracts for all of the league's players. The current CBA has been in place since 1993, and was amended in 1998 and again in 2006. The NFL has not had any labor-related work stoppages since the 1987 season, which is much longer than Major League Baseball, the NBA or the NHL. The current CBA was originally scheduled to expire at the end of the 2012 season, but in 2008 the owners exercised their right to opt out of the agreement two years early.
Players are tiered into three different levels with regards to their rights to negotiate for contracts:
Players who have been drafted (see below), and have not yet played in their first year, may only negotiate with the team that drafted them. If terms cannot be agreed upon, the players' only recourse is to refuse to play ("hold out") until terms can be reached. Players often use the threat of holding out as a means to force the hands of the teams that drafted them. For example, John Elway was drafted by the Baltimore Colts in 1983 but refused to play for them. He had a fallback option of baseball, as he had played in the New York Yankees organization for two summers while at Stanford. The Colts traded his rights to the Denver Broncos and Elway agreed to play. Bo Jackson sat out an entire year in 1986, choosing to play baseball in the Kansas City Royals organization rather than play for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, the team that had drafted him. He reentered the draft the following year, and was drafted and subsequently signed with the Los Angeles Raiders.
Players that have played three full seasons in the league, and whose contract has expired are considered "Restricted Free Agents" (see below). They have limited rights to negotiate with any club.
Players that have played four or more full seasons in the league, and whose contract has expired, are considered "Unrestricted Free Agents"(see below) and have unlimited rights to negotiate with any club. Teams may name a single player in any given year as a "Franchise Player" (see below), which eliminates much of that player's negotiation rights. This is a limited right of the team, however, and affects only a small handful of players each year.
In the 2010 season, unless the CBA is extended, the rules will change so that players don't become "Unrestricted Free Agents" until they have played at least six full seasons in the league. They will be "Restricted Free Agents" if they have three–five full seasons in the league.
Among the items covered in the CBA are:

The league minimum salary
The salary cap
The annual collegiate draft
Rules regarding "free agency"
Waiver rules