1973–74 NFL playoffs
NFL seasonal playoff games
The National Football League playoffs for the 1973 season began on December 22, 1973. The postseason tournament concluded with the Miami Dolphins defeating the Minnesota Vikings in Super Bowl VIII, 24–7, on January 13, 1974, at Rice Stadium in Houston, Texas.
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.
This was the first NFL postseason in which none of the twelve "old guard" NFL teams played in the conference championship games.
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 1973 playoffs been seeded, the AFC divisional matchups would have been #3 Oakland at #2 Cincinnati and #4 wild card Pittsburgh at #1 Miami; the NFC matchups would not have changed, although #3 Dallas would have had to travel to #2 Los Angeles, and #1 Minnesota would have had home field for the NFC championship game.
“1973–74 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 Q4575923. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1973, 1974 and 1975.
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This entry incorporates text from “1973–74 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.