NFC North
division of the National Football League's National Football Conference
The NFC North (formerly known as the Western Conference Central Division and the NFC Central) is one of the four divisions of the National Football Conference (NFC) in the National Football League (NFL). Nicknamed the "Black and Blue Division" for the intense and longstanding rivalry games between the teams, it currently has four members: the Chicago Bears, Detroit Lions, Green Bay Packers, and Minnesota Vikings. The Tampa Bay Buccaneers were members from 1977 to 2001 before a league-wide reorganization moved the team to the NFC South. The division was originally formed in 1967 as part of the Western Conference and was called the Central Division. With the completion of the AFL–NFL merger in 1970, the Western Conference was renamed to the National Football Conference (NFC), with the Central Division retaining its name and styled as the NFC Central. In 2002, the division was renamed to the NFC North. Excluding a dominant period by the Bears in the 1980s, the division has consistently been won by the Vikings and Packers, who have 21 and 17 division titles, respectively. The most recent winner of the division was the Bears in the 2025 NFL season.
History
The NFC North traces its history back to the Western Division of the NFL, which was formed in 1933 alongside the Eastern Division. From 1933 to 1966, the winners of these divisions played each other in the NFL Championship Game to determine that season's champion.
“NFC North” enters the record as division of the National Football League's National Football Conference. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what North, division and National can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“NFC North” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, North, division and National provides the most credible route into that argument.
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 22, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q925668. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1977, 2001, 1967 and 1970.
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This entry incorporates text from “NFC North” 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.