When Does the NFL Football Season Start?
The NFL football season is one of the most highly anticipated events of the year. Fans can’t wait to see their favorite teams take the field and compete for the championship. But when does the NFL football season actually start?
Introduction
The NFL season kicks off on September 10th with the Super Bowl champions, the Baltimore Ravens, hosting the Denver Broncos.
The Preseason
The National Football League preseason is the period each year during which NFL teams play several not-for-the-record exhibition games before the actual “regular” season starts.
Preseason games are most commonly held in August, but can also take place in July and September. The NFL regular season typically kicks off on the Thursday night following Labor Day.
The Preseason schedule gets underway with the Pro Football Hall of Fame Game, which is traditionally held on the Sunday night before the start of the NFL regular season. The game is played at Fawcett Stadium in Canton, Ohio, home of the Pro Football Hall of Fame.
The Regular Season
The National Football League’s (NFL) 17-week regular season begins in early September and ends in late December or early January. During the regular season, each team plays 16 games and has one bye week.
The Playoffs
The NFL playoffs are a single-elimination tournament held after the end of the regular season to determine the NFL champion. From 1933 to 1966, the NFL postseason generally only consisted of the NFL Championship Game, pitting the league’s two division winners (or in 1960–1961, the first-place teams from the Eastern and Western Conference standings) against each other. In 1967, the league expanded to four teams with the addition of the AFL–NFL World Championship Game, better known as Super Bowl I. The tournament then expanded to eight teams in 1978 with the addition of four teams from a second division, raising it to its current level of 12 teams. The number of games has increased gradually from two (in 1933, when there was only one division and no playoff system) to three (from 1967 to 1969, when there were two divisions but only 10 teams total), then four (1978), five (1982), six (1985), seven (1989), and finally its current eight games (1990).
The Super Bowl
The Super Bowl is the biggest and most important American football game of the year. It is the annual championship game of the National Football League (NFL). The game is played at the end of each NFL season. The two best teams in the NFL play against each other in the Super Bowl. The winning team gets the Vince Lombardi Trophy.
The first Super Bowl was played on January 15, 1967. The Green Bay Packers beat the Kansas City Chiefs 35-10. The most recent Super Bowl was played on February 4, 2018. The Philadelphia Eagles beat the New England Patriots 41-33.
