Professional

NFL

Action from the DC Defenders (red) and Seattle Dragons (white) in the XFL, a professional league that has undergone three incarnations in its history.

The 32-team National Football League (NFL) is currently the only major American football league in the United States. There have been numerous attempts over the past several decades to create a second major or high-level professional league, most of which failed within a few years or, in the cases of the All-America Football Conference and 1960s American Football League, merged with the NFL. The National Football League has the highest revenue and average attendance of any sports league in the world.

The NFL has not operated any developmental minor leagues since the folding of the NFL Europe League in 2007. There are some "independent" leagues operating in the US, but they are not overseen by the NFL and the teams has no affiliation to NFL franchises.

University and collegiate

Alabama Crimson Tide football fans tailgating on the main campus of the University of Alabama. College football is particularly popular in the southeastern United States

College football is also popular throughout North America.^[10] Most of college football in the United States is governed by the NCAA. Many colleges and universities have football teams, often with dedicated football stadiums. These teams mostly play other similarly sized schools, through the NCAA's divisional system, which divides collegiate sports teams into four divisions (I-FBS, I-FCS, II and III). The largest, most popular collegiate teams routinely fill stadiums larger than 75,000.^[11] Eight college football stadiums—the University of Michigan's Michigan Stadium, Penn State's Beaver Stadium, Ohio State's Ohio Stadium, Texas A&M's Kyle Field, the University of Tennessee's Neyland Stadium, LSU's Tiger Stadium, Alabama's Bryant–Denny Stadium, and Darrell K Royal–Texas Memorial Stadium at the University of Texas at Austin—seat more than 100,000 fans and usually sell out. The weekly autumn ritual of college football includes marching bands, cheerleaders, homecoming, parties, the tailgate party; it forms an important part of the culture in much of small-town America.^[12][13] Football is a major source of revenue to the athletic programs of schools, public and private, in the United States.^[14] Top college football players enter the NFL Draft after their college careers are over, in hopes of signing with an NFL team.

"FBS" and "FCS" are abbreviations for the Football Bowl Subdivision and Football Championship Subdivision, two sections of Division I that exist only in football. These two subdivisions were formerly known as Divisions I-A and I-AA respectively. The Championship Subdivision, consisting mostly of smaller schools than the FBS but larger than D-II, has a multiple-round playoff system just like Divisions II and III, while the Bowl Subdivision has only a limited, and unofficial, four-team playoff and has historically only featured division championships and bowl games. FBS and FCS teams can, and often do, play against each other. Unofficially, the Bowl Subdivision is divided into two further subdivisions, "major conferences" (also known as "Power Five conferences") and "mid-majors" (known in modern parlance as the "Group of Five"). In practice, only major conference teams are eligible to compete for the national championship and receive significant favor in the opinion polling over mid-majors, and it was not until the addition of the BCS National Championship Game that mid-majors had a realistic chance at appearing in one of the major bowls. Although the FCS has a playoff, three conferences do not participate (the Ivy League does not allow its teams to play in the postseason, and the historically black SWAC and MEAC instead play each other in a bowl of their own). Division III teams do not offer scholarships to their players; two Division I FCS leagues also do not offer scholarships—the Ivy League, which prohibits athletic scholarships in any sport, and the Pioneer Football League, which only competes in football and whose members all offer scholarships in non-football sports.

With the exception of the annual Army–Navy Game, only Power Five conference teams air on national broadcast television, although mid-majors, FCS teams, D-II and D-III games can see more limited coverage on cable and local television.

Though the NCAA is the most publicized college athletic organization, the NAIA (which houses mostly smaller private colleges in the midwest), NJCAA (an association for community colleges), and California Community College Athletic Association (CCCAA) (that state's equivalent to the NJCAA) also sanction football games. There also exists a club football circuit for student-run teams and colleges that choose not to compete at the varsity level. In addition to this, 10 colleges field teams in the Collegiate Sprint Football League, a league in which all players must weigh no more than 178 pounds (81 kg) in order to be eligible to play; four of those teams are long-established sprint teams that co-exist alongside their NCAA counterparts (two from the Ivy League and two military academies), while six teams that have been added since the CSFL began an ongoing expansion in 2008 either never had a varsity squad (one recent addition, 2015 expansion team Chestnut Hill College, was an all-women's school that did not even admit men until 2003) or downgraded from an NCAA team to a sprint team.

High school

Most American high schools field football teams. High school football is popular; top schools regularly fill stadiums holding over 10,000 fans, and can afford artificial playing surfaces.

High school teams generally play only against other teams from their state (notable exceptions include matchups between nearby schools located on opposite sides of a state line and occasional matchups between two nationally ranked teams for television purposes). Still, some private Christian high schools play for national championships through organizations like the Federated Christian Athletic Association. Public high school football in most states, as is the case with other high school sports, is governed by the National Federation of State High School Associations (NFHS).

For rural schools that do not have the student body to support a full football team, the NFHS sanctions nine-man football (most popular in the upper Midwest), six-man football (most commonly used in Texas, although previously more widely popular and undergoing a minor revival elsewhere), and eight-man football (which the most common reduced-man format in most other states).

Adult amateur football and semi-pro football

Adult amateur football, also known as semi-pro football, is a level of American football. It is commonly known as "working man's" football, meaning the players have regular jobs and play football on the weekends. Though the players do not get paid, the leagues and the games are run in a somewhat professional manner. For most leagues, it is against the rules to pay its players to play. The rules of the game are usually a hybrid of NFL and NCAA rules.

There are several different leagues, regional in nature, playing in the United States:

Several leagues supporting women's semi-professional football play have existed. The current major league is the Women's Football Alliance (WFA). The WFA started to play in 2009 stocked with teams from two dissolved leagues, the National Women's Football Association and Women's Professional Football League (NWFA and WPFL respectively).

Other codes

American 7s Football League (A7FL) is a semi-professional league which plays a seven-man version of gridiron football, while the American Flag Football League plays a variant of American football where, instead of tackling players to the ground, the defensive team must remove a flag or flag belt from the ball carrier to end a down.

US National American football team

USA Football assembles a national football team for competition in the IFAF World Championship every four years. Because of concerns over competitive balance, USA Football did not field teams for the first two events in 1999 and 2003. The 2007 team consisted solely of amateur players who had graduated from college that spring, from a diverse mix of smaller and larger colleges and universities. The 2011 squad's criteria were looser, allowing some professional players to play (mostly unemployed, lower-end and minor league players; no NFL or NCAA stars participated). Both the 2007 and 2011 incarnations of the team won their year's respective world championship.

The IFAF also fields an U-19 team composed of high school football players that has participated in the 2009, 2012, 2014 and 2016 junior world championships. The national U-19 team won the 2009 and 2014 contests but lost the 2012 contest to Canada.

Women's football in the United States

Women's football teams in the United States have had many sports leagues. Among them are the Women's Professional Football League (1965–1973), the Women's Professional Football League, the Independent Women's Football League, the Women's Football Alliance, and the X League. In 1970, Patricia Palinkas became the holder of the Orlando Panthers and became the first woman to play in the Atlantic Coast Football League,^[46] and in 2010 Katie Hnida became the kicker for the Fort Wayne FireHawks in the Continental Indoor Football League.^[47]