2001–02 NFL playoffs
Seasonal NFL playoffs
The National Football League playoffs for the 2001 season began on January 12, 2002. The postseason tournament concluded with the New England Patriots defeating the St. Louis Rams in Super Bowl XXXVI, 20–17, on February 3, at the Louisiana Superdome in New Orleans, Louisiana.
Until the 2020 season, this was the last season that three wild card teams qualified for the playoffs in each conference, and the last time a wild card team from each conference hosted a postseason game. The addition of the Houston Texans to the league in 2002 led to a realignment to eight divisions. The number of playoff berths remained six per conference, meaning one wild card berth per conference was eliminated and there would be no more meetings between wild card teams in the first round. As was the case prior to 2002, division champions retain priority for higher seeding and home field advantage regardless of records. Under the 2002 system, the only way two wild card teams in the same conference could meet in the playoffs would be for both teams to each win two road games to advance to the conference championship game hosted by the fifth seed, which never occurred. Under the current playoff format, wild card qualifiers can meet in any playoff round except the wild card round.
Participants
Within each conference, the three division winners and the three non-division winners with the best overall regular season records qualified for the playoffs.
The public source identifies “2001–02 NFL playoffs” as seasonal NFL playoffs. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around playoffs and Seasonal.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 11, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q4599538. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2001, 2002 and 2020.
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This entry incorporates text from “2001–02 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.