The AFC and the NFC are the NFL’s two halves, sixteen teams each. They exist because they were separate leagues that merged in 1970: the AFC is essentially the old American Football League, and the NFC is most of the old NFL. Each is split into four divisions of four.
What a conference actually is
AFC stands for American Football Conference. NFC stands for National Football Conference. Sixteen teams in each, thirty-two in total.
A conference is not a separate competition. Teams from both play each other during the season, and both are governed by the same league with the same rules. What a conference does is organise the path to the title: each one runs its own playoff tournament, and the two winners meet in the Super Bowl.
If a team is in the AFC, it stays in the AFC. Teams almost never switch, and only one has done it this century.
Two teams from the same conference can never meet in the Super Bowl
This is the practical consequence, and it’s the thing worth knowing before anything else.
Because the Super Bowl is the AFC champion against the NFC champion, two teams from the same conference cannot possibly play in it. However good they both are. However much you’d want to see it.
So if two brilliant teams are in the same conference, one of them will knock the other out before the final. The furthest they can meet is the conference championship game, one round earlier, and that game is the reason those rounds often feel bigger than the Super Bowl itself.
Why there are two of them: the merger
Here’s the bit that makes everything else make sense, and almost nobody tells a newcomer.
The AFC and NFC are not two halves of one thing that were drawn up on a map. They are two separate leagues that merged, and the seams still show.
The NFL had been going since the 1920s. In 1960 a rival league started up, the American Football League, and after several years of competing for players and television money the two sides agreed to merge. The merger was announced in June 1966 and completed for the 1970 season, with the combined league keeping the NFL name.
So when you look at the AFC, you are mostly looking at the old AFL. And when you look at the NFC, you are mostly looking at the old NFL. That is the whole explanation.
The three teams that switched sides
There was an arithmetic problem. The NFL had sixteen teams and the AFL had ten. To make two conferences of equal size, three NFL clubs had to move across to join the ten AFL teams, giving thirteen each.
Nobody volunteered at first. Many of the old NFL people regarded the AFL as the lesser league and had no interest in joining it. The merger stalled on exactly this.
Then it was solved by rivalry. Art Modell, who owned the Cleveland Browns, asked the commissioner whether he could switch, because it would let him play Cincinnati twice a year in what became known as the Battle of Ohio. When Art Rooney of the Pittsburgh Steelers heard that, he asked to switch too, so he could keep playing Cleveland. The Baltimore Colts made the third.
Cleveland, Pittsburgh and Baltimore went across in 1970. Fifty-six years later they are still in the same conference, and Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Baltimore and Cincinnati are still in the same division. Two owners moved leagues to protect a fixture, and the AFC North is what’s left of that decision.
The eight divisions, and how they were drawn
The two conferences are each split into four divisions of four teams: East, North, South and West.
That arrangement is newer than you’d think. It dates from 2002. Before then there were six divisions across the league, of uneven sizes, and it only became possible to have eight neat divisions of four when the Houston Texans joined as the thirty-second team.
NFL owners approved the plan unanimously on 22 May 2001, to start the following season. Five of the eight new divisions kept all four teams from the previous arrangement. The only club asked to change conference entirely was Seattle, who moved from the AFC West to the NFC West, which is where they had been in their first season back in 1976 before switching to the AFC a year later.
The division that exists partly because of a lawsuit
The AFC North has a constraint most divisions don’t.
When the original Cleveland Browns left for Baltimore in 1996, the resulting dispute was settled with the city of Cleveland, and part of that settlement required Cincinnati, Cleveland and Pittsburgh to be placed in the same division under any future realignment.
So when the league redrew the map in 2001, that grouping was not up for discussion. It was a legal obligation. The AFC North is the only division in American sport I know of that is partly the product of a court settlement, and it happens to be the same grouping two owners engineered by hand thirty years earlier.
All thirty-two teams, by conference and division
| AFC East | AFC North | AFC South | AFC West |
|---|---|---|---|
| Buffalo Bills | Baltimore Ravens | Houston Texans | Denver Broncos |
| Miami Dolphins | Cincinnati Bengals | Indianapolis Colts | Kansas City Chiefs |
| New England Patriots | Cleveland Browns | Jacksonville Jaguars | Las Vegas Raiders |
| New York Jets | Pittsburgh Steelers | Tennessee Titans | Los Angeles Chargers |
| NFC East | NFC North | NFC South | NFC West |
|---|---|---|---|
| Dallas Cowboys | Chicago Bears | Atlanta Falcons | Arizona Cardinals |
| New York Giants | Detroit Lions | Carolina Panthers | Los Angeles Rams |
| Philadelphia Eagles | Green Bay Packers | New Orleans Saints | San Francisco 49ers |
| Washington Commanders | Minnesota Vikings | Tampa Bay Buccaneers | Seattle Seahawks |
Source: NFL official standings. Current for the 2026 season.
Why the names don’t match the map
Because the divisions were never drawn from a map. They were drawn from rivalries, and then labelled with compass points afterwards.
Two examples make the point.
Dallas plays in the NFC East. Dallas is in Texas. It sits further west than every single team in the NFC North and the NFC South. It is in the East because it has played Washington, Philadelphia and the New York Giants twice a year for decades, and breaking that up to satisfy a compass would have been vandalism.
Indianapolis plays in the AFC South. It is further north than Cincinnati and Baltimore, both of whom play in the AFC North.
And Miami, the southernmost team in the entire league, plays in the AFC East, because that is where it was in the AFL.
When the league redrew things in 2001 it did try to reduce the geographic oddities, and it did reduce them. What it would not do was tear up fixtures that people had built their year around. If the names look wrong to you, you have understood the system correctly. The names are the least important thing about it.
What your conference and division actually decide
Three things, and they matter more than the labels suggest.
Who you play. Six of your seventeen games are against your three division rivals, home and away. That’s over a third of your season against the same three teams, every single year. It’s why divisional games carry the weight they do. The NFL season explained covers how the other eleven are chosen.
Whether you reach the playoffs. Winning your division guarantees a playoff place and one of the top four seeds, regardless of your record. Finish second in a strong division and you may go home while a worse team hosts a playoff game. How the NFL playoffs work has the 2025 season worked through, where exactly that happened.
Who you can meet in the Super Bowl. Only a team from the other conference. That’s the rule the whole structure exists to produce, and the Super Bowl guide picks up from there.
Common questions
What is the difference between the AFC and the NFC? They are the NFL’s two conferences, sixteen teams each, and the difference is historical rather than sporting. The AFC is largely the old American Football League, which merged with the NFL in 1970, plus three NFL clubs who switched across to balance the numbers. The NFC is most of the pre-merger NFL. Both play by the same rules, and their champions meet in the Super Bowl.
How many divisions are there in the NFL? Eight, four in each conference, named East, North, South and West, with four teams in each. That structure began in 2002, when the Houston Texans joined as the thirty-second team and made an even split possible.
Can two teams from the same conference play in the Super Bowl? No. The Super Bowl is always the AFC champion against the NFC champion, so two teams from the same conference can never meet in it. The closest they can come is the conference championship game, one round earlier.