National Football League
2012-2013 Baltimore Ravens: Super Bowl XLVII (47) Champions
The Baltimore Ravens cap off an incredible 2012-2013 season, incredible playoff run, and an incredible career for Ray Lewis with an emotional win in the Super Bowl.
Super Bowl XLVII is an upcoming American football game between theAmerican Football Conference (AFC) champion Baltimore Ravens and theNational Football Conference (NFC) champion San Francisco 49ers to decide the National Football League (NFL) champion for the 2012 season. It will be played at the Mercedes-Benz Superdome in New Orleans, Louisiana, on February 3, 2013 at 6:30 EST.
Nicknamed the Harbaugh Bowl, HarBowl, SuperBaugh, and the Brother Bowl, this will be the first Super Bowl featuring opposing head coaching brothers, Baltimore’s John Harbaugh and San Francisco’s Jim Harbaugh, whose clubs previously met in a 2011 Thanksgiving Classic, in which John’s Ravens won, 16–6. The Ravens, after finishing the 2012 regular season with a 10–6 record, are making their second Super Bowl, having previously won Super Bowl XXXV. Ray Lewis, the MVP from that game, returns for this game, which he has said will be his last before his retirement from professional football. The 49ers enter the game seeking their sixth Super Bowl win in team history (and first since Super Bowl XXIX), which would tie the Pittsburgh Steelers with the most Super Bowl wins, after going 5–0 in their previous appearances. San Francisco finished the regular season at 11–4–1.
Full Color Football – Episode 1 – The New Frontier.
Episode 1: “The New Frontier” (original air date: 9/16/2009) looks at how Lamar Hunt, after the NFL turned down his attempts to purchase a franchise, arranges a group of fellow businessmen, the self-titled “Foolish Club,” to start their own league. The episode examines back stories of the 8 founding owners, and spotlights the AFL’s humble beginnings, from games played in mostly empty stadiums to the exciting 1962 championship game that took 2 overtimes to be resolved. Full Color Football: The History of the American Football League is a sports documentary miniseries that focuses on the American Football League (AFL, 1960-1969), recognized by many as the genesis of modern Professional Football. The 5-part series originally aired on the US pay-cable network Showtime in the fall of 2009 to coincide with the 50th anniversary season of both the AFL’s founding and its original 8 teams. Reruns are currently airing on NFL Network. The show traces the history of the league using game broadcasts and highlight footage (some of which have never been previously aired on national television); archived and recent interviews with AFL personalities and players including Joe Namath, Al Davis and John Madden; and commentary from football historians, authors, and AFL eyewitnesses such as Ange Coniglio, Dan Rather and Larry King, and AFL players including Ernie Warlick, Alex Kroll, and Larry Eisenhauer. The show is narrated by Peter Coyote and was produced by NFL Films.
History of the National Football League
In 1920, representatives of several professional American football leagues and independent teams met in Canton, Ohio, and founded the American Professional Football Conference, soon renamed the National Football League. The first official championship game was held in 1933; before then, there was no playoff system, and instead the team that finished with the best regular season record was awarded the league title. By 1958, when that season’s NFL championship game became known as “The Greatest Game Ever Played“, the NFL was on its way to becoming one of the most popular sports leagues in the United States. In 1965, football supplanted baseball as the most popular televised sport in America. The merger with the American Football League, agreed to in 1966 and completed in 1970, greatly expanded the league and created the Super Bowl, which has become one of the most watched sporting events in the world, and is second to association football (soccer)’s UEFA Champions League final as the most watched annual sporting event worldwide.
The National Football League (NFL) is the highest level of professional American football in the United States, and is considered the top professional American football league in the world. 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 an unincorporated 501(c)(6) association, a federal nonprofit designation, comprising its 32 teams.
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 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.
The NFL is the most attended domestic sports league in the world by average attendance per game (16 a season), with 67,394 fans per game in 2011–12.
Regular season
This chart displays an application of the NFL scheduling formula. At the end of the 2008 season, the Browns (in green) finished in fourth place in the AFC North. Thus the Browns in 2009 had to play all the other AFC North teams (in blue) twice; all the AFC West teams (another division within its own conference) once; all the NFC North teams (a division in the other conference) once; and the Bills and the Jaguars, who also finished in fourth place in their respective AFC divisions during that previous season.
National Football League regular season
Following the preseason, each of the thirty-two teams embark on a seventeen-week, sixteen-game schedule, with the extra week consisting of a bye to allow teams a rest sometime in the middle of the season (and also to increase television coverage). The regular season currently begins the Thursday evening after Labor Day with a primetime “Kickoff Game” (NBC currently holds broadcast rights for that game). According to the current scheduling structure, the earliest the season could begin is September 4 (as it was in the 2008 season), while the latest would be September 10 (as it was in the 2009 season, due to September 1 falling on a Tuesday). The regular season ends no later than January 3, in any given year.
The league uses a scheduling formula to pre-determine which teams plays whom during a given season. Under the current formula since 2002, each of the thirty-two teams’ respective 16-game schedule consists for the following:
- Each team plays the other three teams in their division twice: once at home, and once on the road (six games).
- Each team plays the four teams from another division within its own conference once on a rotating three-year cycle: two at home, and two on the road (four games).
- Each team plays the four teams from a division in the other conference once on a rotating four-year cycle: two at home, and two on the road (four games).
- Each team plays once against the other teams in its conference that finished in the same place in their own divisions as themselves the previous season, not counting the division they were already scheduled to play: one at home, one on the road (two games).
Although this scheduling formula determines each of the thirty-two teams’ respective opponents, the league usually does not release the final regular schedule with specific dates and times until the spring; the NFL needs several months to coordinate the entire season schedule so that, among other reasons, games are worked around various scheduling conflicts, and that it helps maximize TV ratings.
Playoffs
The NFL Playoffs. Each of the four division winners is seeded 1–4 based on their W-L-T records. The two Wild Card teams (labeled Wild Card 1 and 2) are seeded fifth and sixth (with the better of the two having seed 5) regardless of their records compared to the four division winners.
The season concludes with a twelve-team tournament used to determine the teams to play in the Super Bowl. Thetournament 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 four division champions from each conference (the team in each division with the best regular season won-lost-tied record), which are seeded one through four based on their regular season won-lost-tied record (tie-breaker rules may apply).
- Two wild card qualifiers from each conference (those non-division champions with the conference’s best record, i.e. the best won-lost-tied percentages, with a series of tie-breaking rules in place in the event that there are teams with the same number of wins and losses), which are seeded five and six.
In each conference, the No. 3 and No. 6 seeded teams, and the No. 4 and No. 5 seeds, face each other during the first round of the playoffs, dubbed the Wild Card Playoffs (the league in recent years has also used the term Wild Card Weekend). The No. 1 and No. 2 seeds from each conference receive a bye in the first round, which entitles these teams to automatically advance to the second round, the Divisional Playoff games, to face the winning teams from the first round. In round two, the No. 1 seeded team always plays the lowest surviving seed in their conference. And in any given playoff game, whoever has the higher seed gets the home field advantage (i.e. the game is held at the higher seed’s home field).
The two surviving teams from the Divisional Playoff games meet in Conference Championship games, with the winners of those contests going on to face one another in the Super Bowl in a game located at a neutral venue that is usually either indoors or in a warm-weather locale. The designated “home team” alternates year to year between the conferences. In odd-numbered Super Bowls, the NFC team is the designated “home team”, with the AFC team serving as the home team for even-numbered games.
The NFL is the only one out of the four major professional sports leagues in the United States to use a single-elimination tournamentin all four rounds of its playoffs; Major League Baseball (not including their Wild Card Showdown round), the National Basketball Association and the National Hockey League all use a “best-of” format instead.
