View source for History of National Football League Championship | American Football Database

===The institution of "home-field advantage"===
In {{nfly|1975}}, the league modified its 1970 playoff format by instituting a seeding system. The surviving clubs with the higher seeds were made the [[home team]]s for each playoff round. The three division champions in each conference were seeded first through third based on their regular-season records, with the wild-card team in each conference as the fourth seed.

Teams that earned the top seed became known as clinching "[[Home team|home-field advantage]]" throughout the playoffs, since they played all of their playoff games at their home stadium (except for the Super Bowl, played at a neutral site).

However, the league continued to prohibit meetings between teams from the same division in the Divisional Playoffs.  Thus, there would be times when the pairing in that round would pit the first seed versus the third, and the second versus the fourth. This system is identical to that now in use by [[Major League Baseball]].