NFL Divisions and Conferences: AFC vs NFC, All 32 Teams
NFL divisions and conferences: all 32 teams across eight divisions, how the AFC and NFC differ, and why the map looks the way it does.
By CricketTaken EditorialPublished Updated NFL Season & Playoffs22 min read
- Teams
- 32
- Conferences
- 2
- Divisions
- 8
- Last realignment
- 2002
Dallas sits farther west than Minneapolis, New Orleans and Chicago. Its football team plays in the NFC East. Indianapolis is north of both Cincinnati and Baltimore and belongs to the AFC South, and the three NFL teams in Florida are spread across three divisions and both conferences. The league's map has never been drawn by a geographer.
It was drawn by owners, and what they produced is at least tidy on paper. The NFL has 32 teams divided into two conferences of 16, the American Football Conference and the National Football Conference. Each conference is divided into four divisions of four teams: East, North, South and West. That makes eight divisions in all. The alignment took effect in 2002 and no team has changed division or conference since, which is the longest period of stability in the league's history. Every team is listed below, division by division.
The structure in one view: 32 teams, two conferences, eight divisions
- 32Teams in the league
- 2Conferences
- 8Divisions
- 4Teams in each division
The alignment in force since the 2002 season. No team has moved between divisions in that time.
| Division | Teams |
|---|---|
| AFC East | Buffalo Bills, Miami Dolphins, New England Patriots, New York Jets |
| AFC North | Baltimore Ravens, Cincinnati Bengals, Cleveland Browns, Pittsburgh Steelers |
| AFC South | Houston Texans, Indianapolis Colts, Jacksonville Jaguars, Tennessee Titans |
| AFC West | Denver Broncos, Kansas City Chiefs, Las Vegas Raiders, Los Angeles Chargers |
| NFC East | Dallas Cowboys, New York Giants, Philadelphia Eagles, Washington Commanders |
| NFC North | Chicago Bears, Detroit Lions, Green Bay Packers, Minnesota Vikings |
| NFC South | Atlanta Falcons, Carolina Panthers, New Orleans Saints, Tampa Bay Buccaneers |
| NFC West | Arizona Cardinals, Los Angeles Rams, San Francisco 49ers, Seattle Seahawks |
The symmetry is the point. Before 2002 the divisions held four, five or six teams, schedules were built around those uneven numbers, and a team's path to the playoffs depended partly on how crowded its division happened to be. With eight groups of four, every team has three division rivals, plays each of them twice, and faces the same pattern of other opponents as every other club in the league.
The conference names are abbreviated everywhere, including by the league itself. Nobody says "American Football Conference" out loud. On a broadcast it is the AFC and the NFC, and the standings graphic lists four divisions under each.
Two things the structure is not. It is not a ranking: no conference or division sits above another, and there is no promotion or relegation of any kind. And it is not regional in the strict sense, as the opening paragraph suggests. The compass labels are loose descriptions applied to groups that were assembled mostly for other reasons.
The AFC division by division
Three of the four AFC divisions are built on the old American Football League. The fourth is the newest grouping in the sport.
AFC East
Buffalo, New England and the Jets were charter members of the AFL in 1960, the Patriots as the Boston Patriots and the Jets as the New York Titans. Miami joined them as an AFL expansion team in 1966. The four have shared a division ever since, first in the AFL's Eastern Division and from 1970 in the AFC East. That history is the whole explanation for Miami's presence in a division with three northeastern cities.
AFC North
Pittsburgh, Cleveland and Cincinnati have been together since 1970, when the Steelers and Browns crossed over from the old NFL and landed in the new AFC Central with the Bengals. The Bengals and Browns share a founder in Paul Brown, who built the Cleveland team that bears his name, was fired from it, and started the Cincinnati franchise a few years later. Baltimore arrived in 1996, when the original Browns franchise moved there and became the Ravens; Cleveland kept the name and the records and got a new team in 1999. Steelers against Ravens has been the division's defining game for most of this century.
AFC South
Created from scratch in 2002. The Texans were the expansion team that made the realignment necessary. The Colts came over from the AFC East, and the Titans and Jaguars from the AFC Central. The Titans are the former Houston Oilers, which gives the division its one piece of inherited feeling: Houston's current team plays twice a year against the franchise that left the city in 1997.
AFC West
Denver, Kansas City, the Raiders and the Chargers were the four members of the AFL's Western Division in its first season, 1960, when the Chiefs were still the Dallas Texans and the Chargers played in Los Angeles. They are still together. Other teams have passed through, Cincinnati for two seasons before the merger, Tampa Bay for one in 1976 and Seattle for a quarter of a century, but the core four have never been separated, and no other division in the league can say that of all its current members going back that far. The Raiders' feuds with Kansas City and Denver are older than the Super Bowl.
The NFC division by division
The NFC is where the old league lives. Of the teams that were in the NFL before the merger, all but three ended up here.
NFC East
The Giants date from 1925, the Washington franchise from 1932, when it began life in Boston, and the Eagles from 1933. Dallas was added to the league in 1960, was shifted into the Eastern Conference a year later, and spent the rest of the decade playing those three. Every pairing in the division is a rivalry of long standing, and the four markets include the country's largest and several more of its biggest. That last fact has more to do with the division's survival in this shape than anything else on this page.
NFC North
Chicago and Green Bay first played each other in 1921, and the game has been played more often than any other in the league. The Bears are one of two surviving charter franchises from the NFL's founding in 1920, when they were the Decatur Staleys. The Lions joined the league in 1930 as the Portsmouth Spartans of Ohio and moved to Detroit in 1934. Minnesota, the newcomer, started play in 1961. The four were first grouped as the NFL's Central Division in 1967 and have not been apart since. Our guide to the league's oldest franchises gives the founding order in full.
NFC South
The only division made up entirely of expansion teams: Atlanta in 1966, New Orleans in 1967, Tampa Bay in 1976, Carolina in 1995. It was assembled in 2002 from clubs that had been stranded in the NFC West and NFC Central, and for three of the four it was the first time the compass label on their division had matched the map.
NFC West
The other charter survivor is here. The Cardinals trace their origins to a neighborhood team in Chicago in the nineteenth century, were an original member of the league in 1920, and have since played in St. Louis and Arizona. The Rams started in Cleveland in 1937 and have twice called Los Angeles home with a spell in St. Louis between. San Francisco entered the NFL in 1950 from the defunct All-America Football Conference. Seattle joined as an expansion team in 1976.
AFC vs NFC: the same rules, separate standings
Ask what separates the two conferences and the truthful answer is: the standings page, and nothing else.
Both play under one rulebook, with the same roster limits, the same salary cap, the same 17-game schedule and the same officials. A team's conference determines exactly two things. It determines whom that team is compared with in the standings, and it determines which playoff bracket the team enters.
Each conference sends seven teams to the postseason: its four division winners, seeded first through fourth by record, and three wild cards, the best remaining teams regardless of division, seeded fifth through seventh. The top seed in each conference has the first weekend off. The two brackets run separately through the wild-card round, the divisional round and a conference championship game. Our explainer on NFL playoff seeding and its tiebreakers follows that process in detail.
Only then do the conferences meet. The AFC champion plays the NFC champion in the Super Bowl, and that is the single game of the postseason in which teams from opposite conferences can face each other. It follows that two teams from the same conference can never meet in a Super Bowl, however good both are, and that the league's two best teams in a given year frequently play each other a round or two early.
In the regular season the wall is lower. Teams from the two conferences play each other every week, as a later section explains. Those games count fully in a team's overall record. They count for less in tiebreakers, because conference record is one of the main criteria for separating level teams and an interconference game is not part of it. A loss to a team from the other conference is the cheapest loss on the schedule.
There is a difference of character, and it comes from history rather than from any rule. The NFC holds most of the league's oldest franchises and many of its largest markets. The AFC holds the ten franchises of the upstart league of the 1960s. For years the two had separate television partners as well, which gave each a slightly different look on Sunday afternoons. On the field the conferences are indistinguishable.
What a division decides
Start with the six games. Each team plays its three division rivals twice a season, once at home and once away, and those six games are more than a third of its schedule. They are the fixed part. Everything else rotates.
The division title is worth a great deal. Finish first and a team is in the playoffs automatically, whatever its record. It is seeded in the top four in its conference, ahead of every wild card. And it hosts a game in the wild-card round, unless it holds the top seed and is resting. A wild-card team with a better record still travels to the division winner's stadium. That guarantee has produced some lopsided-looking pairings, and it is the subject of our page on the worst records ever to reach the NFL playoffs.
Division games also weigh more heavily when records are level. To break a tie between two teams in the same division, the league's procedure looks first at head-to-head results, then at each team's record within the division, then at their records in common games, and then at conference record before moving on to strength-of-victory and strength-of-schedule measures. A team can therefore lose the division to a rival with the same overall record because it went 3-3 against the other three clubs and the rival went 4-2.
| Step | Tiebreaker between two teams in the same division |
|---|---|
| 1 | Head-to-head record in the two games between them |
| 2 | Record in games played within the division |
| 3 | Record in common games |
| 4 | Record in games played within the conference |
| 5 | Strength of victory |
| 6 | Strength of schedule |
The list continues past those six into points-based rankings and ends, in theory, with a coin toss. It almost never gets that far.
There is a softer consequence too. Because a team sees the same three opponents twice every year, division games are where familiarity is greatest and where a coaching staff's long-term roster decisions are aimed. Clubs draft and sign players with specific division opponents in mind, a pass rusher to chase one rival's quarterback, a cornerback to match another's receiver. The last weekend of the regular season is made up entirely of division games for the same reason. Those are the matchups most likely to still mean something.
How the two conferences cross over on the schedule
- Division rivals, home and away35.3%
- One other division in the same conference23.5%
- One division in the other conference23.5%
- Same-place finishers in the same conference11.8%
- Seventeenth game, other conference5.9%
The NFL scheduling formula in use since 2021. Every team plays the same breakdown.
Show the numbers
| Item | Value |
|---|---|
| Division rivals, home and away | 6 |
| One other division in the same conference | 4 |
| One division in the other conference | 4 |
| Same-place finishers in the same conference | 2 |
| Seventeenth game, other conference | 1 |
Five of a team's 17 games are against the other conference. Four of them come as a block: each division is paired with one division from the opposite conference for a season, and every team in one plays every team in the other, two at home and two away. The pairings rotate on a four-year cycle. An NFC East team will play the whole AFC West one year, a different AFC division the next, and return to the AFC West in the fifth season. Since the home and away halves alternate, the rotation sends a team to any given stadium in the other conference once every eight years.
The fifth is the seventeenth game, added in 2021. It also crosses conferences, and it is matched by standing: a team that finished first in its division plays the first-place team from a designated division on the other side, second plays second, and so on. Because 17 is an odd number, half the league gets a ninth home game each year. The league handles that by conference. AFC teams hosted the extra game in 2021, 2023 and 2025, NFC teams in the even-numbered seasons between.
The remaining games stay inside the conference. Six are the division games. Four are against all the teams in one of the other three divisions in the same conference, on a three-year rotation. The last two are against the teams that finished in the same position in the two same-conference divisions not otherwise on the schedule. The full derivation, and the way dates are then attached to it, is in our piece on how the NFL schedule is put together.
Across the league this produces 80 interconference games a season, out of 272. It was 64 before the seventeenth game arrived.
What the formula guarantees is worth stating plainly, because it is unusual in American sports. Every team plays every other team in the league at least once in any four-year span. No franchise can go a decade without seeing another. And fourteen of a team's 17 opponents are fixed by rotation years in advance, so the only games that depend on how good it was the previous season are the three matched by standing. The schedule's reputation for rewarding bad teams with easy slates is mostly undeserved.
Why the map looks wrong
The Cowboys are the standing example. Dallas is closer to every city in the NFC South than to any city in its own division, and it has played in the East for its entire existence. The reason is that Dallas against Washington, Philadelphia and New York is television's favorite set of games, and the owners of all four clubs have always known it.
The 1970 alignment that first put Dallas in the NFC East was settled by chance, in a way described near the end of this page. The 2002 alignment was deliberate. The league set out principles for that redrawing, and preserving established rivalries ranked above geographic neatness. So the Cowboys stayed, and it was the Arizona Cardinals, who had even less business in the East, who were moved out.
Indianapolis is the mirror case. The Colts had been in the AFC East since 1970, a holdover from their Baltimore years, and somebody had to leave that division to get it down to four. The other four members had been together since the AFL. The Colts went south, into a new division with Tennessee, Jacksonville and Houston, and ended up in the AFC South while sitting at a higher latitude than two of the four teams in the AFC North.
Florida shows the same logic three times over. Miami stayed in the AFC East with the three teams it had played since 1966. Jacksonville, an AFC team from its first season, went into the AFC South. Tampa Bay, in the NFC, went into the NFC South. The state's three teams therefore share no division, and the two that share a conference, Miami and Jacksonville, meet only when the rotation brings them together.
Kansas City, in the middle of the country, plays in the West because it always has. Baltimore is on the Atlantic seaboard and plays in the North. The honest summary is that the compass labels were chosen to fit groups already agreed on other grounds, and they fit some better than others. It is hard to argue the owners got it wrong. A division is worth what its six games draw, and the old pairings draw.
Teams that moved cities and kept their divisions
A franchise's division travels with it. That is the working rule, and it explains several of the map's stranger periods.
The Rams left Los Angeles for St. Louis in 1995 and returned in 2016. They were an NFC West team throughout, including the two decades spent in a city on the Mississippi. The Raiders went from Oakland to Los Angeles in 1982, back to Oakland in 1995 and on to Las Vegas in 2020 without ever leaving the AFC West. The Chargers moved from San Diego to Los Angeles in 2017 and stayed where they were in the standings. In those three cases the moves were between western cities and the label never looked odd.
The Cardinals are the case that did. They moved from St. Louis to the Phoenix area in 1988 and remained in the NFC East for fourteen more seasons, flying to New York, Philadelphia and Washington every year from the desert. Nothing in the league's rules required a change, and none was made until the whole map was redrawn in 2002.
| Franchise | Move | Division before and after |
|---|---|---|
| Colts | Baltimore to Indianapolis, 1984 | AFC East, unchanged until 2002 |
| Cardinals | St. Louis to Arizona, 1988 | NFC East, unchanged until 2002 |
| Rams | Los Angeles to St. Louis, 1995, and back in 2016 | NFC West throughout |
| Oilers, later Titans | Houston to Tennessee, 1997 | AFC Central, then AFC South from 2002 |
| Raiders | Oakland to Las Vegas, 2020 | AFC West throughout |
| Chargers | San Diego to Los Angeles, 2017 | AFC West throughout |
The league treats realignment as a rare, collective act, taken when the number of teams changes, and treats relocation as one club's business. The two are decided by different votes at different times. Our history of every NFL team that has changed cities covers the moves themselves, and the page on how each franchise got its name picks up the cases where a move brought a new identity with it.
Expansion and relocation have occasionally combined to produce something stranger. Baltimore's current team entered the AFC Central in 1996 in the slot the Browns had vacated, and when Cleveland was given a new franchise in 1999 the division swelled to six.
Which conference has had the better of it
Through Super Bowl LX, played in February 2026, the NFC and its pre-merger NFL predecessors had won 31 Super Bowls and the AFC and its AFL predecessors 29. That count treats the first four games, which matched the champions of two separate leagues, as part of the same series. The margin is narrow and it moves every year.
The total hides three very different periods. After Green Bay won the first two games, the AFL and then the AFC took 11 of the next 13, a run built on Miami, Pittsburgh and the Raiders. Then the pendulum swung harder than it ever has since. NFC teams won thirteen consecutive Super Bowls from the game played in January 1985 through the one played in January 1997, most of them by wide margins, behind San Francisco, Washington, the Giants and Dallas. Denver ended the streak the following year, and the AFC has had the better of the period since, largely through New England and Kansas City.
No rule produced any of that. The conferences draft from the same pool under the same cap. A streak of thirteen is what happens when a handful of exceptionally strong organizations sit on the same side of the bracket for a decade. For the count by franchise, see our table of Super Bowl wins by team.
The regular-season record between the conferences is a less tidy measure, and the league does not publish it as a headline figure. The AFC won the interconference series in most seasons of the 1970s, which matched its Super Bowl results. Since then the yearly balance has swung in both directions and has usually been close, with an occasional lopsided season that prompts a round of commentary and then reverts the next year. We have not printed an all-time tally here because we could not confirm one to the game.
The 2002 realignment: eight divisions of four
Houston was awarded an expansion franchise in 1999, to begin play in 2002. Thirty-two teams divide evenly in a way that 31 do not, and the league took the opportunity to rebuild its structure. Owners approved the new alignment in 2001, a full season before it took effect.
The stated priorities were to keep existing rivalries where possible and to group teams sensibly by region where that did not conflict. Each conference's Central division was renamed the North, and a South was created in each.
| Team | Division through 2001 | Division from 2002 |
|---|---|---|
| Seattle Seahawks | AFC West | NFC West |
| Arizona Cardinals | NFC East | NFC West |
| Indianapolis Colts | AFC East | AFC South |
| Tennessee Titans | AFC Central | AFC South |
| Jacksonville Jaguars | AFC Central | AFC South |
| Tampa Bay Buccaneers | NFC Central | NFC South |
| Atlanta Falcons | NFC West | NFC South |
| Carolina Panthers | NFC West | NFC South |
| New Orleans Saints | NFC West | NFC South |
| Houston Texans | New franchise | AFC South |
Seattle's was the only move between conferences. Houston was going into the AFC, which would have left that conference with 17 teams and the NFC with 15, so one AFC club had to cross. The Seahawks had begun their existence in the NFC West in 1976 before being switched to the AFC a year later, and they went back to where they had started.
The other effect was on the playoffs and the schedule. With four division winners per conference in place of three, the number of wild cards dropped from three to two, where it stayed until the field expanded in 2020. And the rotation described earlier became possible for the first time. Under the old alignment, with divisions of different sizes, the schedule leaned much more heavily on the previous year's standings, and two teams in the same division could play noticeably different slates.
The three-division era, 1970 to 2001
For 32 seasons each conference had an East, a Central and a West, and the labels were looser then than they are now.
Atlanta and New Orleans were in the NFC West from the day the conference was created, sharing a division with Los Angeles and San Francisco. When Carolina joined the league in 1995 it was put there too, so that three teams from the Southeast were playing a home-and-away series against a team from California every year. Tampa Bay spent that era in the NFC Central with Chicago, Detroit, Green Bay and Minnesota, a Florida team in what was otherwise a cold-weather division.
The 1976 expansion was handled in an unusual way. Seattle and Tampa Bay came in together, Seattle in the NFC West and Tampa Bay in the AFC West, and swapped conferences after one season, with the Buccaneers settling in the NFC Central and the Seahawks in the AFC West. Across those first two seasons each of the newcomers was scheduled to meet every other club in the league once.
By the end, the divisions looked like this.
| Division, 2001 | Teams |
|---|---|
| AFC East | Buffalo, Indianapolis, Miami, New England, New York Jets |
| AFC Central | Baltimore, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Jacksonville, Pittsburgh, Tennessee |
| AFC West | Denver, Kansas City, Oakland, San Diego, Seattle |
| NFC East | Arizona, Dallas, New York Giants, Philadelphia, Washington |
| NFC Central | Chicago, Detroit, Green Bay, Minnesota, Tampa Bay |
| NFC West | Atlanta, Carolina, New Orleans, St. Louis, San Francisco |
That is 31 teams, with a six-team AFC Central in which each club played ten division games and a schedule in which someone was idle every week. The playoff format changed several times across the era. Outside the strike season of 1982, when the divisions were ignored, it always had three division winners per conference, with a number of wild cards that grew from one to two in 1978 and to three in 1990. A division title was harder to win in a group of six than a group of four, and the arrangement had few defenders by the time it was replaced.
Where the conferences came from: the 1970 merger
The number of franchises in the seasons when it changed. Expansion came in 1976, 1995, 1999 and 2002.
Show the numbers
| Item | Teams |
|---|---|
| 1970 | 26 |
| 1976 | 28 |
| 1995 | 30 |
| 1999 | 31 |
| 2002 | 32 |
The two conferences are the fossil record of a war. The American Football League began play in 1960 as a rival to the NFL, the two spent six years bidding against each other for players, and in June 1966 they agreed to merge. A championship game between them began that season and a common draft the next. The full merger, with one league and one schedule, took effect in 1970. Our history of the AFL-NFL merger tells that story at length.
The problem in 1970 was arithmetic. The NFL had 16 teams and the AFL had ten. Keeping the old leagues intact as conferences would have produced a lopsided structure, so three NFL clubs were asked to move across and make it 13 and 13. Baltimore, Cleveland and Pittsburgh agreed, and each was paid $3 million to do it. Those three joined the ten AFL franchises to form the American Football Conference. The 13 remaining NFL teams became the National Football Conference.
The AFC settled its divisions first. The NFC could not agree on its own. Its owners argued for months over who would play whom, and in January 1970 the question was settled by lot: five alignment plans were written out and placed in a vase, and Commissioner Pete Rozelle's secretary, Thelma Elkjer, drew one. The plan she picked kept Dallas in the East with New York, Philadelphia, Washington and St. Louis, and put Atlanta and New Orleans in the West.
So the most argued-over feature of the modern map, the Cowboys' place in the NFC East, was first fixed by a draw from a vase. Thirty-two years later, when the owners had the chance to change it on purpose, they left it alone. For more on how the league's year is organized around this structure, the United States hub gathers our other guides to the American game.