What Do NFC and AFC Stand For?
NFC stands for National Football Conference, while AFC is short for American Football Conference. The two are conferences of the National Football League, and each comprises 16 football teams that play in the NFL.
The teams in the two conferences are grouped into four divisions: East, West, North and South. Each division is comprised of four teams. During the playoffs, the best teams in the NFC play each other, and all the best teams in the AFC play each other as well.
The top teams in either conference then face off for the NFL title in a finale dubbed the “Super Bowl,” played on the first Sunday of February at a location chosen earlier.
The journey to the finale starts when teams with the best record from the regular season advance to the playoffs. In addition to the four teams from each conference that advance to the playoffs, two other teams are selected as wild card teams, usually those with the best overall record in each of the two conferences. That makes it a total of 12 teams in the playoffs, six from each conference. Special tiebreakers are used to determine which team advances in case two teams from the same division have identical records. A team that loses in the playoffs is automatically eliminated.
