The National Football League (NFL) playoffs are a single-elimination tournament held at the end of the 16-game regular season to determine the NFL champion. Six teams from each of the league's two conferences qualify for the tournament based on regular season records, and a tie-breaking procedure exists in the case of equal records. It ends with the Super Bowl, the league's championship game.
NFL post-season 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. The first true NFL playoff began in 1967, when four teams qualified for the tournament. When the league merged with the American Football League in 1970, the playoffs expanded to eight teams. The playoffs were expanded to ten teams in 1978 and twelve teams in 1990.
