The American Football Conference (AFC) is one of the two conferences of the National Football League (NFL), the highest professional level of American football in the United States. The AFC and its counterpart, the National Football Conference (NFC), each contain 16 teams with 4 divisions. Both conferences were created as part of the 1970 merger between the National Football League, and the American Football League (AFL). All ten of the AFL teams, and three NFL teams, became members of the new AFC, with the remaining thirteen NFL teams forming the NFC. A series of league expansions and division realignments have occurred since the merger, thus making the current total of 16 teams in each conference. The current AFC champions are the Kansas City Chiefs, who defeated the Cincinnati Bengals in the 2022 season's AFC Championship Game for their third conference championship. Teams Like the NFC, the conference has 16 teams organized into four divisions each with four teams: East, North, South and West. Season structure This chart of the 2021 season standings displays an application of the NFL scheduling formula. The Bengals in 2021 (highlighted in green) finished in first place in the AFC North. Thus, in 2021, the Bengals are scheduled to play two games against each of its division rivals (highlighted in light blue), one game against each team in the AFC East and NFC South (highlighted in yellow), and one game each against the first-place finishers in the AFC South, AFC West (highlighted in orange), and NFC East (highlighted in pink). Currently, the fourteen opponents each team faces over the 17-game regular season schedule are set using a pre-determined formula: Each AFC team plays the other teams in their respective division twice (home and away) during the regular season, in addition to eleven other games assigned to their schedule by the NFL: three games are assigned on the basis of a particular team's final divisional standing from the previous season, and the remaining eight games are split between the roster of two other NFL divisions. This assignment shifts each year and will follow a standard cycle. Using the 2021 regular season schedule as an example, each team in the AFC West plays against every team in the AFC North and NFC East. In this way, non-divisional competition will be mostly among common opponents – the exception being the three games assigned based on the team's prior-season divisional