Fourteen of the NFL’s 32 teams make the playoffs — seven per conference — and how they’re seeded shapes everything that follows: who gets the lone bye, who hosts, and who travels in January. The format has been stable since 2020: four division winners seeded 1 through 4 by record, three wild cards seeded 5 … Read more
NFL flexible scheduling — “flexing” — is the league’s mechanism for rescuing its prime-time windows from bad games. When the schedule is built in May, the league is guessing which teams will matter in December; flex rules let it swap a scheduled prime-time dud for a better matchup once the season reveals itself, moving games … Read more
Every marquee game of college football’s Week 1, September 3 through 7, with kickoff times, TV channels and streaming. Indiana’s title defense, Clemson at LSU, Boise State at Oregon, Notre Dame at Lambeau and the Monday night closer.
When roughly 1,180 players hit the street at the NFL’s roster cutdown on August 30, most of them don’t simply become free agents. Players with fewer than four accrued seasons pass through waivers — a roughly 24-hour window in which all 31 other teams can put in a claim, with the player awarded to the … Read more
The AFL-NFL merger is the single most important business deal in American sports history. Announced on June 8, 1966 and completed for the 1970 season, it ended a six-year war between the established National Football League and the upstart American Football League, created the Super Bowl, produced the two-conference structure that still governs the sport, … Read more
Before the Super Bowl, there was the NFL Championship Game — the league’s title game from 1933 through 1969, played by the two division (later conference) winners for the right to be called world champions. It produced some of the sport’s most mythologized moments: the Bears’ 73-0 rout of Washington in 1940, the Colts’ overtime … Read more
A “medical redshirt” is the informal name for what the NCAA calls a hardship waiver: a way for a player who loses most of a season to injury or illness to get that season of eligibility back. It’s distinct from a standard redshirt — which a player earns by choice by staying under four games … Read more
A “medical redshirt” is the informal name for what the NCAA calls a hardship waiver: a way for a player who loses most of a season to injury or illness to get that season of eligibility back. It’s distinct from a standard redshirt — which a player earns by choice by staying under four games … Read more
College football eligibility used to be a simple sentence: four seasons of competition within five calendar years. It hasn’t been simple in a while. Between the four-game redshirt rule, the medical hardship waiver, the COVID-19 blanket year, the transfer portal, the graduate transfer exception, and a wave of lawsuits over junior-college years, the question “how … Read more
Intentional grounding is the penalty for a quarterback throwing the ball away to avoid a sack when he isn’t allowed to — and the definition of “allowed to” is where the NFL and college football part ways. Both rulebooks agree on the principle: a passer facing pressure can’t just fling the ball into the dirt … Read more