1975–76 NFL playoffs
NFL seasonal playoff games
The National Football League playoffs for the 1975 season began on December 27, 1975. The postseason tournament concluded with the Pittsburgh Steelers defeating the Dallas Cowboys in Super Bowl X, 21–17, on January 18, 1976, at the Orange Bowl in Miami.
This was the first season in which the league used a seeding system in the playoffs. Thus, the surviving clubs with the higher seeds were made the home teams for each playoff round. The three division champions in each conference were seeded 1 through 3 based on their regular season won-lost-tied record, and the wild card qualifier in each conference (i.e., the conference's top non-division winner with the best overall regular season record) became the 4 seed.
Participants
Within each conference, the three division winners and the non-division winner with the best record qualified for the playoffs. The three division winners were seeded 1–3 based on their overall won-lost-tied record, and the wild card team was seeded 4. The first round, dubbed the divisional playoffs, had a restriction where two teams from the same division could not meet: the surviving wild card team visited the highest-seeded division champion that was outside its own division, and the remaining two teams from that conference played each other. The two surviving teams from each conference's divisional playoff games met in the respective AFC and NFC Conference Championship games, hosted by the higher seed. Although the Super Bowl, the championship round of the playoffs, was played at a neutral site, the designated home team was based on an annual rotation by conference.
“1975–76 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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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 27, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q4576988. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1975 and 1976.
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This entry incorporates text from “1975–76 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.