1972–73 NFL playoffs
NFL seasonal playoff games
The National Football League playoffs for the 1972 season began on December 23, 1972. The postseason tournament concluded with the Miami Dolphins defeating the Washington Redskins in Super Bowl VII, 14–7, on January 14, 1973, at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum in Los Angeles, California, becoming the only NFL team to finish a championship season undefeated and untied.
Like the previous NFL seasons, the home teams in the playoffs were decided based on a yearly divisional rotation, excluding the wild card teams who would always play on the road and would not play against their own division champion in the playoffs unless they both made it to the Conference Championship; they would not be paired with each other in the first round.
Participants
Within each conference, the three division winners and the non-division winner with the best overall regular season record of all remaining teams in the conference qualified for the playoffs. The NFL did not use a seeding system until the 1975 season, and instead home teams during the first two rounds of the playoffs alternated by division. Thus, it is possible that a team could host another club with a better regular season record. For the Super Bowl, the championship round was played at a neutral site, the designated home team was based on an annual rotation by conference.
Bracket
Note: Prior to the 1975 season, the home teams in the playoffs were decided based on a yearly rotation. Had the playoffs been seeded, the divisional matchups in the AFC would not have changed, but undefeated Miami would have had home field advantage for the AFC championship game. The NFC divisional matchups would have been #4 wild card Dallas, ineligible to play Washington, at #2 Green Bay and #3 San Francisco at #1 Washington.
“1972–73 NFL playoffs” enters the record as nFL seasonal playoff games. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what playoffs, seasonal and playoff can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“1972–73 NFL playoffs” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, playoffs, seasonal and playoff provides the most credible route into that argument.
Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 19, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q4575367. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1972, 1973 and 1975.
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This entry incorporates text from “1972–73 NFL playoffs” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.