American Football League (Alternity)

The American Football League (AFL) is the primary professional football league in the United States. The AFL was founded with 11 teams in 1920, while today it is comprised of as many as 40 teams; in 1970, the AFL absorbed its smaller rivals, the NFL (Northern Football League) and the WFC (Western Football Conference), adding a total of 11 new teams to the league's roster.

It is currently divided into five divisions: Eastern, Northern, Midwest, Southern, and Western. Every January or February (following the season's conclusion), two teams, champions of the regular season and the League's Playoffs, compete in the Super Bowl, the annual championship game. The first game, Super Bowl I (SB-I) was played in January 1967, at the L.A. Memorial Coliseum, between the San Francisco 49ers and the Boston Patriots.

Teams
The AFL is composed of 40 teams at present, divided into five major divisions as follows:

Northern Division
¹ (Oldest team still playing in the League)

Midwest Division
² (Second oldest team in the League; was founded and joined the AFL only three months after the Cardinals)

Southern Division
³ (Most recent team to join the AFL)

Playoffs
Following the conclusion of the regular season, eight teams head to the playoff bracket: the division winners, the runner-ups of each division (excluding the Northern and Midwestern due to their small division size), and two wild-cards based on best record. The bracket is set up as a seed system (i.e. 1v8, 2v7, 3v6, 4v5).

Mississippi Bowl
The Mississippi Bowl is the all-star conference game for AFL players in teams based east of the Mississippi River (or in those bordering it). Players selected for the Mississippi Bowl are considered the "best of the best", or the elite, of the League's eastern half and are sometimes referred to as "M-Bowlers". It has been traditionally held at the Louisiana Dome in Manheim, Louisiana every first Friday in March (post-Super Bowl) since the event's inception in 1971.