Super Bowl Packages are the best way to get tickets for the big game every year. The Super Bowl is the culmination of the American football season. Each year it is a game between the two best teams in the league.
Super Bowl Packages typically include tickets to the big game, hotel accommodations, and possibly other amenities such as airfare, food, ground transportation, and varied pre-game activities.
The Super Bowl game is considered the biggest game of the season. It is played between the winners of each of the two conferences of the National Football League (NFL). The two conferences are the National Football Conference (NFC) and the American Football Conference (AFC). The NFL season is sixteen games long. The season is played over a span of seventeen weeks during the autumn and winter months in the northern hemisphere. The football season commences each season in early September with considerable fanfare. The inaugural game each season is played on a Thursday evening. One of the two teams that participate in the game is the team that won the previous season’s Super Bowl.
The winner of the 2007 season’s Super Bowl was the New York Giants. Thus, they hosted the first game of the 2008 season. Their opponent was the Washington Redskins. Over the course of the seventeen-week season, every team will play sixteen games. Each team will have one, pre-determined week off. It is referred to as their bye week.
The National Football League has thirty-two teams. The teams are divided evenly between the two conferences. Each conference is broken out into four divisions. The divisions are named for the geographic region of the country that they represent – North, South, East, and West. Each of the four divisions has four teams.
After each year’s sixteen game season has been played, twelve teams are selected to advance to a playoff tournament. The division winners from the eight divisions make the playoffs along with four other teams. These other teams are referred to as wild card teams. The division winners are the teams that finish the sixteen-game regular season with the highest winning percentage among those four teams in each of their respective divisions. The teams that names as the wild card teams are the two teams in each of the two conferences who have the highest winning percentage of the remaining teams in each of the two conferences. Since the league only plays sixteen games, the likelihood of teams finishing tied, with the same record is high. As such there needs to be ways to separate the teams. This separation is referred to as tiebreaker rules. These tiebreakers can be very complicated. We will not go into the details here. Suffice to say that there are many layers of tiebreakers. If in the highly unlikely event, two or more teams are still tied after all of the tiebreaker rules have been processed, the tie would be broken by a coin toss. If you are interested in the details, we suggest that you consult the rulebook at nfl.com.
When the season starts, each team’s ownership groups, fifty-three players, their coaching staffs, and all of their front-office personnel have aspirations of winning the Super Bowl. They dream and hope that their players, friends, families, and fans win their playoff games, and representing their conference, so that their followers can purchase Super Bowl Packages and attend the big game at the end of that season. For many teams this dream is just that, a dream that will not be fulfilled.
Usually there are several teams that have very little chance of making the playoffs and advancing through their conference’s playoffs to go to the Super Bowl. However each year, there are teams who may have played poorly the year before, had a poor won-loss record and do well the following year to get their fans to have the opportunity to obtain Super Bowl Packages.
The National Football League has structured its schedule so that teams, who played poorly one year, have the opportunity to turn things around and have success in the subsequent season. The league does this in the manner in which the schedule their games for the next season. The National Football League is comprised of thirty-two teams. However, each team only plays sixteen games each season. Therefore, there is no way for them to play all of the teams in the league. The league automatically schedules each team to play each of its divisional foes twice each year -- once at home and once at their opponent’s stadium. That is six of the sixteen games. The other ten regular season games are played against other divisions and the other conference. The league creates parity by scheduling those other ten games against teams who had similar won-loss records in the prior season. This means that teams who played well, and won their divisions in one season, will likely be facing many teams who did well themselves. Conversely, teams who played poorly in one season, and wound up with a losing record – a poor won-loss percentage, will be playing against several teams who also had poor won-loss record in the previous season.
This could result in many good teams beating one another and many bad teams beating one another. Or, as was the case in the 2008 season, a team who played poorly in the prior season could do very well in the following season playing against their weak opponents and beating a disproportionate number of them. The 2007 Miami Dolphins narrowly escaped having the dubious distinction of being the first team in National Football League history to go winless in a sixteen game season. They had one win in that season, beating the Baltimore Ravens. In 2008, the following season, the Miami Dolphins had a relatively easy schedule. Combined that with several key changes that they made in player personnel, and the Miami Dolphins improved from one win in 2007 to eleven wins in 2008. By finishing that season with an 11-5 won-loss record, the Miami Dolphins won their division – the American Football Conference East Division and moved on to the playoffs and were able to keep their aspirations of securing Super Bowl Packages. They will host the Baltimore Ravens on Sunday, January 4, 2009 at 1:00PM EDT.
Teams who finish one season with a poor record get an easy schedule the following year – they get to play a lot of other teams that had poor records as well. One team that did poorly in 2007 did much worse in 2008. The Detroit Lions had the dubious distinction of being the first team in NFL history to go winless since the league went to a sixteen game schedule. The Detroit Lions finished the season 0-16. There will be no Super Bowl Packages for the Lions, unless they go as spectators.
In 2008, the twelve teams who have advanced to the playoffs to begin the quest for the Super Bowl are:
AFC
1st Seed South Division Winner: Tennessee Titans
2nd Seed North Division Winner: Pittsburgh Steelers
3rd Seed East Division Winner: Miami Dolphins
4th Seed West Division Winner: San Diego Chargers
5th Seed Wild card: Indianapolis Colts
6th Seed Wild card: Baltimore Ravens
NFC
1st Seed South Division Winner: New York Giants
2nd Seed North Division Winner: Carolina Panthers
3rd Seed East Division Winner: Minnesota Vikings
4th Seed West Division Winner: Arizona Cardinals
5th Seed Wild card: Atlanta Falcons
6th Seed Wild card: Philadelphia Eagles
The top two seeds in each conference, those teams with the best records get a bye in the first round of the playoffs. The playoff pairings for the first round of the playoffs are:
Saturday January 3, 2009
Atlanta Falcons @ Arizona Cardinals 4.30pm EDT
Indianapolis Colts @ San Diego Chargers 8:00pm EDT
Sunday January 4, 2009
Baltimore Ravens @ Miami Dolphins 1:00pm EDT
Philadelphia Eagles @ Minnesota Vikings 4:30pm EDT
The pairings for the next round of the playoffs are determined based upon which teams win. The lowest seeded winners will travel to the two top seeds in each conference.
Super Bowl Packages are on their minds of all of these teams have as we enter the playoffs. Good luck to all of them.
