AFC vs NFC – Difference and Comparison | Diffen

The American Football Conference (AFC) and National Football Conference (NFC) make up the American National Football League (NFL). Each conference has 16 teams in the United States, four in each division (North, South, East, West). The top six teams from both conferences (division leaders and two wild card teams) play each other, and the last undefeated team in each conference plays in the Super Bowl.

Brief History of the NFL, AFC, and NFC

The AFC and NFC were both created in 1970, during the merger of two football leagues, the American Football League and the National Football League. The NFL has existed since 1920, but the AFL was only established in 1959 by a group of expansion team owners who had been refused entrance into the NFL. The two leagues were direct competitors for a decade until the merger, which created a unified National Football League split into the two conferences. After the merger, the AFC was the dominant conference in terms of Super Bowl wins throughout the 1970s, and the NFC won a long stretch of consecutive Super Bowls through the 1980s and mid 1990s (13 wins in a row). For the last decade, the two conferences have been more evenly matched. There have been occasional shifts and rebalancing of the divisions and conferences over the years to accommodate new teams.

League Structure

Each conference of the NFL is split into 4 divisions (North, South, East, and West). Each division has 4 teams, meaning each conference has 16 teams, and the entire league has 32 teams.

Season Structure

Each season, a team will play against every other team in their division twice, while inter-conference games account for 1/4 of the regular season games. During the playoffs, the top six teams from both the AFC and NFC (the 4 division leaders and two wild card teams from each conference) play each other, and the last undefeated team in each conference plays in the Super Bowl.

Money

The NFL works under a salary cap system, meaning that in theory, each team is allowed the same amount of money to spend on their players. Although there are ways to circumvent this in a given year by signing players with prorated bonuses, the salary cap is effective in keeping any one team or conference from having a disproportionate amount of capital to work with in the long term. However, the market value of teams is unrestricted. The average team worth in the NFL is $1.17 billion, making the NFL the most valuable sports league in the world. The Dallas Cowboys (NFC) are currently listed as the league’s most valuable team at $2.3 billion. The NFC has 3 of the 4 most valuable teams, as of 2014.

Geography

The AFC and NFC do not officially represent opposing geographical areas, and each league has the same regional divisions of East, West, North, and South. But a map of team distribution shows a concentration of AFC teams in the northeast of the country stretching from Massachusetts to Indiana, and NFC teams grouped around the Great Lakes region and in the South.

A map showing the locations of all current football teams in the NFC and AFC.

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