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If you’re up to date with the NFL, then you can see that the Patriots are in trouble. But if you listened to what they said in the wake of a third straight lackluster preseason performance, a 27-17 it wasn’t as close as the final score drubbing by the Eagles last night, then things are not as bad as they look in this awful, 0-3 preseason.

 While you would have expected self-flagellation after another unsatisfactory performance, the New England Patriots tried to strike a confident and positive tone after the game. Panic? What panic? “We can’t be up and down with the media and the fans because that’s what it is, it’s a roller coaster,” said cornerback Ellis Hobbs. “You can’t allow your emotions to set in especially so early in the season, where the season hasn’t even begun. I’m not necessarily saying we don’t have problems that we need to correct, but [it’s] having the sense and poise to say these problems can be corrected and it’s not too late.”Right now, as far as we’re concerned we’re 0-3 in the preseason, but we’re still 0-0.”

 But something is clearly wrong with this team, at least in the preseason, and it goes further than the absence of quarterback Tom Brady, who missed his third straight preseason game with a sore right foot. The team that former Patriots cornerback Asante Samuel returned to play against turn off no resemblance to the one he left, having gone from perfect to perplexing. The Patriots followed a familiar and distressing formula. Matt Cassel (8 of 14 for 60 yards, sacked three times) struggled, the defense was destroyed, and an overall lack of execution permeated everything New England did.

Summer is about to end and the fans all over the country can’t wait for September 4^th, the date when the 2008-2009 NFL season starts. Everyone’s wondering if a Manning will take home the Super Bowl title once again, or if the Patriots can improve last year’s almost perfect record with a Super Bowl win. According to ESPN.com the New England team is the strongest one in the league, followed by the Colts and the Chargers with the Dallas Cowboys and the Jacksonville Jaguars rounding out the top five. Last year’s Super Bowl winners, the New York Giants, came in at number 6! Since the season hasn’t started yet it’s still anybody’s game, and you never know if your favorite underdog team will rise up to dominate the 2008-2009 NFL season.

The NFL consists of 32 teams that are divided into two conferences: the American Football Conference (AFC) and the National Football Conference (NFC), each of which has four divisions. The NFL season is played during the late summer, through autumn, and into January.

The professional teams play 4 exhibition games, and then 16 regular-season games. Teams play one game per week, using the time between games to recover, do the training, and prepare for the next one. Each team receives one week without a game, known as a bye, during the season.

At the end of the season, each conference has separate playoff games to establish which team would be the conference champion. The top team in each division automatically qualifies for the conference playoffs and is ranked number one through three based on its win-lose record. Three additional teams, called “wild cards”, also qualify for playoff berths based on their win-loss record in the conference.

During the first round of the playoffs, the lowest-ranked wild-card team plays the lowest-ranked division champion, while the other two wild-card teams play each other. The losers are eliminated and the winner of each game advances to play one of the remaining division champions in the semifinals. Semifinal winners move forward to the conference finals, and the winner of that game is proclaimed the conference champion.

The winners of the National Football League’s championship are awarded annually with the Vince Lombardi Trophy, named in honor of former Green Bay Packers coach. The Super Bowl is the final contest of the NFL’s season. Each January the AFC and NFC champions play against each other for the title of The Super Bowl. This event reaches hundreds of millions of viewers around the world. The first Super Bowl took place in 1967, when there were actually two separate football leagues, the NFL and the American Football League (AFL). In this game, the Green Bay Packers of the NFL defeated the Kansas City Chiefs of the AFL in what was called the AFL-NFL World Championship Game. The game was renamed the Super Bowl in 1969.

Every April the NFL conducts its amateur draft, in which each team obtains the rights to the professional services of the best college players. Any player who is three seasons out of high school qualifies for the NFL draft, if that player renounces college football eligibility by early January. To decide the order of the draft the NFL goes by the win-loss records of the previous season, so that teams with inferior records draft earlier than those with better records. The NFL draft consists of seven rounds. Those players not selected in the draft can be invited to try out for a team and are sometimes signed to contracts as free agents.

The NFL is one of the biggest businesses for players, owners, advertisers, and other industries tied to the sport. NFL franchises generate huge earnings for host cities, in addition to promoting civic pride and national exposure. Therefore, cities often compete for teams, offering prospective teams bigger and better stadiums, guaranteed fan support, and various economic incentives. In the 1980’s three NFL teams relocated: the Raiders moved from Oakland, California, to Los Angeles in 1982; the Colts moved from Baltimore, Maryland, to Indianapolis, Indiana, and became the Indianapolis Colts in 1984; and the Cardinals moved from St. Louis, Missouri, to Phoenix, Arizona, and became the Phoenix Cardinals in 1988 (later changed to Arizona Cardinals). Several other moves happened in the 1990s. In 1995 the Los Angeles Rams became the St. Louis Rams when they moved from Los Angeles to St. Louis, and the Raiders returned to Oakland. The Cleveland Browns moved to Baltimore, Maryland, in 1996; the team was renamed the Baltimore Ravens. In 1997 the Houston Oilers moved to Tennessee and became the Tennessee Titans. Other teams have agreed to stay in their home cities only with the promise of new facilities in the future.

New teams are occasionally accepted into the NFL, and there is usually fierce competition among cities to be selected as the home for a new team. In 1995 two of these expansion teams began to play: the Carolina Panthers, in Charlotte, North Carolina; and the Jacksonville Jaguars, in Jacksonville, Florida. A new Cleveland Browns franchise began to play in 1999. In 2002, the newest expansion franchise was the Houston Texans, started playing at Reliant Stadium.