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2026 season

Projected playoff bracket

Built from your picks: the four division winners in each conference first, then the three wild cards, then a bracket of 14.
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The format

  1. 7 clubs from each conference, 14 in all. The four division winners take seeds 1 to 4, ordered by record. The three best clubs that did not win a division take seeds 5, 6 and 7, in that order.
  2. A division winner is seeded above every wild card, whatever the records say. A 9–8 division winner is the 4 seed and a 12–5 wild card is the 5 seed. This is the part that looks like a mistake and is not.
  3. The 1 seed rests. One club per conference sits out Wild Card weekend — and only one. The other six play.
  4. Wild Card weekend: 2 plays 7, 3 plays 6 and 4 plays 5, each at the higher seed's stadium.
  5. The bracket reseeds every round. In the Divisional round the 1 seed plays the LOWEST seed still alive and the other two survivors meet. It is not a fixed ladder: beat the 2 seed as the 7 and you have earned the 1 seed, not the other side of the draw.
  6. Home field is the seed, all the way through. Every game up to and including the Conference Championship is hosted by the higher remaining seed. The Super Bowl is the exception: it is played at a neutral stadium chosen years in advance — Super Bowl LXI, SoFi Stadium, Inglewood, Feb 14.
The rounds, in order.
  1. Wild Card
  2. Divisional
  3. Conference Championship
  4. Super Bowl
One bye, not two. Through the 2019 season each conference sent six clubs and rested two. Since 2020 it has been 7 and one, which is why the 2 seed is worth so much less than it used to be and the 1 seed so much more.

What decides a seed

Record, and then the rulebook. No ranking, rating or poll decides a seed in this league — there is no committee and no vote. Clubs are ordered by won-lost-tied percentage, and where two finish level the published tiebreakers settle it: head-to-head, then division record, then common games, then conference record, then strength of victory.
This page does not run the whole procedure. The last steps of the rulebook rank clubs on points scored, points allowed, net points and net touchdowns and finish with a coin toss; picks carry a winner, not a score. Where a tie reaches that far the bracket says which step it stopped at and what it ordered by instead. It is a projection from your picks, not a ruling.
The seeding as the real season actually stands is on the playoff picture. This page is the bracket that follows from YOUR board.

Change the picks

Every game is pickable on its conference predictor page. The same picks drive this bracket, and this browser remembers them. Copy share link on a predictor page makes a link that reproduces them for somebody else.