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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.

The 32-team league is divided into two conferences of 16 teams each the American Football Conference (AFC) and the National Football Conference (NFC). Since 2002, each conference has been further divided into 4 divisions of 4 teams each. The tournament brackets are made up of six teams from each of the league's two conferences, following the end of the 16-game regular season. Qualification into the playoffs are as follows ^[1]

The first round of the playoffs is dubbed the Wild Card Playoffs (the league in recent years has also used the term Wild Card Weekend). In this round, the 3rd-seeded division winner hosts the 6th seed wild card, and the 4th seed hosts the 5th. The 1 and 2 seeds from each conference receive a bye in the first round, which entitles these teams to automatic advancement to the second round, the Divisional Playoffs, where they face the Wild Card Weekend survivors. Unlike most tournaments, with a predetermined bracket, the second round of the playoffs is "re-seeded"; the top seed always hosts the lowest surviving seed, while the other two teams pair off.^[2] The two surviving teams from each conference's Divisional Playoff games meet in the respective AFC and NFC Conference Championship games, with the winners of those contests going on to face one another in the Super Bowl.

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