NFL playoffs
The National Football League 'playoffs' is the annual single-elimination tournament held to determine the league champion. The four-round tournament is held after the league's regular season. Since the 2020 season, seven teams from each of the league's two conferences qualify for the playoffs based on regular season winning percentage, with a tie-breaking procedure if required. The top team in each conference receives a first-round bye, automatically advancing to the next round. The tournament culminates in the Super Bowl, the league's championship game, competed between teams from each conference. Among the four major professional sports leagues in the United States, the NFL postseason is the only one to use a single-elimination tournament in all of its rounds.
NFL postseason history can be traced to the first NFL Championship Game in 1933, though in the early years, qualification for the game was based solely on regular-season records. From 1933 to 1966, the NFL postseason generally only consisted of the NFL Championship Game, which pitted the league's two division winners against each other. In, the playoffs were expanded to four teams. When the league completed its merger with the American Football League in, the playoffs were expanded to eight teams, which increased to ten in 1978, sixteen in 1982, back to ten in 1983, twelve in 1990, and fourteen in 2020.
Format
| Season | – | – | – | – |
| Wild Card | – | – | – | – |
| Divisional | – | – | – | – |
| Conference | ||||
| Super Bowl | Super Bowl | | Super Bowl | | Super Bowl | | Super Bowl | |
The 32-team National Football League is divided into two conferences, the American Football Conference and the National Football Conference. Since 2002, each conference has 16 teams and is further divided into four geographic divisions of four teams each. As of 2025, qualification into the playoffs works as follows:
- The four division champions from each conference are seeded 1 through 4 based on their overall won-lost-tied record.
- Three wild-card qualifiers from each conference are seeded 5, 6, and 7.
The names of the first two playoff rounds date back to the postseason format that was first used in 1978, when the league added a second wild-card team to each conference. The first round of the playoffs is dubbed the wild-card round, wild-card weekend, or, from 2020–21 to 2023–24, super wild-card weekend. In this round, the second-seeded division winner hosts the seventh-seeded wild card team, the third hosts the sixth, and the fourth hosts the fifth. There are no restrictions regarding teams from the same division matching up in any round. The team with the best overall record from each conference receives a first round bye, automatically advancing them to the second round, dubbed the divisional round, and hosts the lowest-remaining seed from the wild-card round. Meanwhile, the other two winners from that round play each other with the higher seeds hosting. The two surviving teams from each conferences' divisional-round playoff games then meet in the respective AFC and NFC Conference Championship games, hosted by the higher-seeded team. The winners of those contests go on to face one another in the Super Bowl which is played at a predetermined site.
The New York Giants and New York Jets have shared the same home stadium since 1984. Thus, if both teams need to host playoff games on the same weekend, they are required to play on different days, even during the Conference Championship round when both games are normally scheduled on the same day. The only time such a scheduling conflict occurred was during Wild Card weekend in 1985 when only 10 teams qualified for the postseason and there were only two wild-card games. The 10-team system was used from 1978 to 1989 excluding 1982. Instead of playing both Wild Card games on the same day, the Jets hosted their game on Saturday, December 28, before the Giants hosted their game on Sunday, December 29. This same scheduling conflict could occur for the Los Angeles Chargers and Los Angeles Rams, who began sharing SoFi Stadium in 2020.
Breaking ties
Often, teams will finish a season with identical records. It therefore becomes necessary to devise means to break these ties, either to determine which teams will qualify for the playoffs or to determine seeding in the playoff tournament. The rules below are applied in order until the tie is broken. Ties within divisions are always broken first to eliminate all but the highest-ranked club in each division before breaking ties between teams in different divisions; however, it should be emphasized that other than for division winners, divisional ranking is not in itself a tiebreaker. For example, if a division runner-up ties with teams finishing third and fourth in another division, the runner-up's record will be compared to the team awarded third place in the other division without regard to the teams' divisional finish.If three or four teams in one division are tied for the division title and/or division runner-up, and also if after breaking ties within divisions three or four teams in different divisions are tied, then should the one or two team be qualified or eliminated at any step the tiebreaker reverts to step one for the remaining two or three teams. If multiple playoff spots are at stake, the rules are applied in order until the first team qualify or are eliminated, then the process is started again for the remaining teams. Finally, once ties are broken between three or more teams qualifying for the playoffs, the relative positions of the seeds determined will not change regardless of wild card and divisional round results – for example, if division winners were to tie for the second, third and fourth seeds in a conference and the third and fourth seeds subsequently advanced to the conference championship game, the team that was originally awarded the third seed would host that game even if it lost a head-to-head tiebreaker against the fourth seed.
The tie-breaking rules have changed over the years, with the most recent changes being made in 2002 to accommodate the league's realignment into eight four-team divisions; record vs. common opponents and most of the other criteria involving wins and losses were moved up higher in the tie-breaking list, while those involving compiled stats such as points for and against were moved to the bottom.
The current tiebreakers are as follows, with coin tosses or drawing of lots used if all of the criteria fail:
| Divisional tiebreakers | Conference tiebreakers |
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Overtime rules
The NFL introduced overtime for any divisional tiebreaker games beginning in and for championship games beginning in. The first postseason game to be played under these rules was the 1958 NFL Championship Game between the Baltimore Colts and New York Giants, decided by a one-yard touchdown run by Colts fullback Alan Ameche after eight minutes and fifteen seconds of extra time. Overtime under the original format was sudden death, the first team to score would be declared the winner.In March, the NFL amended its rules for postseason overtime, with the rule being extended into the regular season in March. If a team scores a touchdown, or if the defense scores a safety on the first possession, it is declared the winner. If it scores a field goal on its first possession, however, it then kicks off to the opposing team, which has an opportunity to score; if the score is tied again after that possession, true sudden death rules apply and whoever scores next will win. True sudden death rules would continue from double overtime hereafter.
The league further amended its postseason overtime rules in March, with the rule being extended into the regular season in April. It allows both teams to have at least one possession even if the first team with possession scores a touchdown.