The National Football League 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 and National Football Conference , 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 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.
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