User:MacNcheese09946/sandbox

Let's say you want to learn about the basic(I mean BASIC) rules of football, well this is your article. There are two conferences, The American Football Conference and The National Football Conference, even though they are different conferences each with different teams. However, they are a part of one BIG conference called the NFL or the National Football League. Each conference has four different divisions, with four teams in each one, for example, the AFC has the AFC South, AFC West, AFC North, and the AFC East. That is the same for the NFC.

Now in a regular season, there are eighteen weeks, for each week a team plays one football game. Each team plays seventeen games in a season so the one week left over is the bye week where the teams can practice and rest. Now let's focus on a singular team. Let's pick the Tennessee Titans. They are a part of the AFC South division, the other teams in the AFC South are the Indianapolis Colts, the Jacksonville Jaguars, and the Texas Houstons. Each team in the NFL will play the other 3 teams in its conference twice so the Titans will play the Colts, Jaguars, and Houstons twice. Then each team will play all four teams from a division in the AFC and the NFC, so this season the Titans will play the Cheifs, the Chargers, the Broncos, and the Raiders all from the AFC West. Now for the NFC, the Titans will play the Eagles, the Commanders(formally known as the Redskins), the Giants, and the Cowboys. All those games combined only make fourteen games, so where are the other three games? Well, each team also plays two intra-conference(in the conference their in) games and one inter-conference(out of the conference their in) game. So for the intra-conference game, the Titans will play the Buffalo Bills and the Cincinnati Bengals, and for the inter-conference game, the Titans will play the Greenbay Packers. So ALL that was just about the conferences and how the NFL assigns the schedules to the different teams. But now we are getting into the way they find out which two teams get to go to the Superbowl! So when you look at the standing of a team you will see under the division they are in that either they are in first, second, third, or fourth. The way they decide this is based on the set of three numbers you also probably see, they will look something like this 1-1-1. The number on the far right stands for wins, the number in the middle is for losses, and for the rare case scenario, the left number is for ties. As I am writing this the Titans are leading the AFC South with 4-2-0, so four wins, two losses, and zero ties. At the end of the eighteen weeks, the teams that are leading the divisions make it to the playoffs, so if the Titans are still leading at the end of the eighteen weeks they will make it into the playoffs for the AFC. Seven teams make it to the playoffs, those teams are called seeds. Four of those teams are the leaders of one of the four divisions in that conference, the other three are wild cards. The wild card is chosen because they have the best records among the teams that aren't division leaders. The first seed gets bye week for the first week of playoffs since they did the best. The second seed plays the seventh seed, the third seed plays the sixth seed. Now for the second2 week, the winner of the game between the third and sixth seeds plays the first seed, and the winner between the fourth and fifth seeds plays the winner between the second and seventh seeds. For the third week, the winner of those two games then plays for the title of AFC or NFC champion(depending on the conference). The AFC and the NFC champions go to the Superbowl.