American Football Conference

The American Football Conference (AFC) is one of the two conferences of the National Football League (NFL), the highest level of professional American football in the United States. The AFC and its counterpart, the National Football Conference (NFC), each have 16 teams organized into four divisions. Both conferences were created as part of the 1970 merger between the National Football League, and the American Football League (AFL). All ten of the AFL teams, and three NFL teams, became members of the new AFC, with the remaining thirteen NFL teams forming the NFC. A series of league expansions and division realignments have occurred since the merger, thus making the current total of 16 teams in each conference. The current AFC champions are the Kansas City Chiefs, who defeated the Buffalo Bills in the 2024 season's AFC Championship Game for their fifth conference championship and went on to lose Super Bowl LIX against the Philadelphia Eagles.

Like the NFC, the conference has 16 teams organized into four divisions each with four teams: East, North, South and West.

Currently, the fourteen opponents each team faces over the 17-game regular season schedule are set using a predetermined formula:

Each AFC team plays the other teams in their respective division twice (home and away) during the regular season, in addition to eleven other games assigned to their schedule by the NFL: three games are assigned on the basis of a particular team's final divisional standing from the previous season, and the remaining eight games are split between the roster of two other NFL divisions. This assignment shifts each year and will follow a standard cycle. Using the 2023 regular season schedule as an example, each team in the AFC West plays against every team in the AFC East and NFC North. In this way, non-divisional competition will be mostly among common opponents – the exception being the three games assigned based on the team's prior-season divisional standing.

At the end of each season, the four division winners and three wild cards (non-division winners with best regular season record) in the AFC qualify for the playoffs. The AFC playoffs culminate in the AFC Championship Game, with the winner receiving the Lamar Hunt Trophy. The AFC champion then plays the NFC champion in the Super Bowl.

With the impending merger with the American Football League (AFL) for the 1970 NFL season, the league had careful discussion over the nature of which teams would play in the newly instituted conferences. Then-NFL President and owner of the Cleveland Browns Art Modell had suggested of a format in which three teams from the NFL would move to the AFC to create two thirteen-team conferences. But negotiations between NFL commissioner Pete Rozelle and other owners was rampant in who would move (for his part, Modell had first assumed the three most recent expansion NFL teams - Minnesota Vikings, Atlanta Falcons, New Orleans Saints would be the ones to move to the AFC), since others wanted to simply have no realignment of NFL teams. The AFL had begun play in 1960 with eight teams before adding two more expansion clubs (the Miami Dolphins in 1966 and the Cincinnati Bengals in 1968) before the merger.

Modell was hospitalized for internal bleeding around the time negotiations were still going. Moreover, Modell was struggling to service the debt he incurred from his purchase of the Browns. Furthermore, he realized there was an opportunity to establish a lucrative in-state rivalry with the newly established Bengals, who had been founded by Paul Brown after Modell had forced him out of Cleveland after purchasing the team.

When Modell was visited in the hospital by Art Rooney (owner of the Pittsburgh Steelers) and Wellington Mara (owner of the New York Giants), Modell offered to have his franchise move to the AFC, provided two other "old guard" franchises did so as well and the three affected teams to move were adequately compensated for joining what was still looked down on in NFL circles as a "junior" or "inferior" circuit. Not wanting to lose his long-established rivalry with Cleveland, the equally cash-strapped Rooney quickly agreed to join the Browns in the AFC. The other NFL owner to ultimately agree to move was the Baltimore Colts' Carroll Rosenbloom.