The National Football League Partly Released the NFL 2012 Schedule

March 27, 2012 - PRLog -- The National Football League (NFL) has partly released the NFL 2012 schedule for the regular season games last Monday, January 2, 2012, revealing each of the 32 team’s home and away matchups.

The announcement was made just a few days before the Super Bowl XLVI played between the National Football Conference (NFC) champion New York Giants and the American Football Conference (AFC) champion New England Patriots. Although the official matchups for the 2012 regular season were already released, the complete schedule containing the specific dates and times for each game is still to be made available late in April. Reasons for the delay in the specific schedule announcement are, among many others, to give time for the league to resolve scheduling conflicts and to maximize television ratings.

The 2012 regular season, which is the 93rd regular season of the NFL, is scheduled to begin Wednesday, September 5, 2012. This regular season will commence with the New York Giants, the defending Super Bowl XLVI champion, hosting an opponent which is still to be determined.

The NFL’s current 32 teams are divided into two conferences, the AFC and the NFC. Furthermore, each conference is divided into four divisions, with each division having four teams. Following the present NFL regular season scheduling pattern, each of the 32 teams will have 16 games within a 17-week period. The regular season ends on December 30, 2012.

The NFL playoffs will then begin on Saturday, January 5, 2013, to be played between six teams—the four division champions plus two wild card qualifiers—for each conference. With the AFC and NFC each having six teams, the playoffs will then consist of twelve teams in total.

The division champions are seeded 1 through 4 based on their overall win-loss-tie record. On the other hand, the wild card qualifiers for each conference, the teams with the best winning percentages, are seeded 5 and 6, with the team with the better winning percentage seeded 5.

The NFL playoffs is divided into three rounds—the Wild Card Playoffs, the Divisional Playoffs and the Conference Championship games—with each of the competing team playing with teams in their respective conferences. In the first round, the third and fourth seed hosts the sixth and fifth seed respectively. The first and second seeds then receive a bye and automatically advance to round two. The playoffs’ second round features the first and second seeds’ matchups with the Wild Card Playoffs winners. The first seed plays with the lowest surviving seed from the first round (seed 4, 5 or 6) while the second seed plays with the other winning team (seed 3, 4 or 5). The two survivors will then compete in the Conference Championships. This season, the Conference Championships is on Sunday, January 20, 2013.

The two emerging conference champions will face each other at Super Bowl XLVII which will be held at Mercedes-Benz Superdome, New Orleans, Louisiana on February 3, 2013.

As with this season’s Pro Bowl, the specific date and time, like with the regular season games, is still to be determined.

With the exact dates and times for the regular season matchups still to be determined, fans are held in suspense. NFL enthusiasts are encouraged to check for updates on the NFL 2012 schedule.

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You can check out the complete NFL 2012 Schedule and see some latest updates by visiting http://nfl2012schedule.com/