NFC Championship Game

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  The NFC Championship Game decided, on the 26th of January 2025, who would advance to the Super Bowl by a score of 55 to 23. That final score, between the Philadelphia Eagles and the Washington Commanders, stands as the most points ever scored in a single NFC title game. It was also the latest chapter in a game that has been played every January since 1971 and has sent more than fifty teams chasing a single trophy named after a man who helped build the sport from nothing.

  How did this game come to exist? What teams have dominated it, and which have never broken through? And what is the George Halas Trophy, the gleaming silver prize waiting for every winner?

• 2. Born From a Merger

  ›

  On the 3rd of January 1971, the Dallas Cowboys beat the San Francisco 49ers 17-10 at Kezar Stadium, playing in the very first NFC Championship Game. That game was a direct product of the merger between the NFL and the American Football League, which had formally combined in 1970 to create a single professional league.

  Before the merger, the two leagues had different sizes. The NFL had sixteen teams and the AFL had ten. To create two balanced conferences, three established NFL clubs moved over to the new AFC: the Baltimore Colts, the Cleveland Browns, and the Pittsburgh Steelers joined the former AFL teams. The remaining thirteen NFL franchises formed the NFC.

  The NFC Championship itself is considered the legal and historical successor to the original NFL Championship that predated the Super Bowl era. Its results are published alongside those of its predecessor in the annual NFL Record and Fact Book. That lineage makes the NFC title game one of the oldest surviving traditions in professional football.

  The structure of how teams qualify for the game has shifted repeatedly over the decades. The number of division champions and wild card teams admitted to the postseason expanded and contracted multiple times between 1970 and 2021, widening the pool of contenders while the championship itself remained the gateway to the Super Bowl.

• 3. The George Halas Trophy

  ›

  Beginning with the 1984-85 playoffs, every NFC Championship winner has left the field holding the George Halas Trophy. The trophy is named after George Halas, who co-founded the NFL and spent decades as the owner and coach of the Chicago Bears, one of the league's charter members.

  The original design was relatively modest: a wooden base with a sculpted NFC logo on the front and a relief of football players on the back. The AFC's equivalent award, the Lamar Hunt Trophy, used a parallel design with its own conference logo.

  For the 2010-11 playoffs, both conference trophies were redesigned by Tiffany and Co. at the NFL's request. The new version is silver, shaped around the outline of a hollow football on a small base, deliberately echoing the look of the Vince Lombardi Trophy given to Super Bowl champions.

  The name George Halas carries a small source of confusion worth knowing. A separate George Halas Trophy was awarded by the Newspaper Enterprise Association to the NFL's defensive player of the year from 1966 to 1996. The Pro Football Writers Association also gives out a George S. Halas Courage Award. The NFC Championship trophy is distinct from both of those honors. Before the Halas Trophy existed, NFL champions going back to 1934 had received the Ed Thorp Memorial Trophy.

• 4. Dynasties and Dominance

  ›

  No franchise has appeared in the NFC Championship Game more often than the San Francisco 49ers, who have played in nineteen of them. Those nineteen appearances include eleven losses, which is also the conference record for most defeats. The 49ers have won eight NFC titles, tying the Dallas Cowboys for the most championships in conference history.

  The Dallas Cowboys reached the game fourteen times total, with eight of those visits ending in wins. Six of those wins came before 1979, and two more followed in the early 1990s. Their last NFC Championship appearance was in 1995, giving them the longest current drought among all NFC franchises.

  The most frequent head-to-head matchup in the game's history has been the Cowboys versus the 49ers, who met six times. The Cowboys led that series 4-2, with three of the most fiercely contested meetings coming in the 1992, 1993, and 1994 seasons, during a stretch when both franchises were at the height of their power.

  At the other end of the spectrum, the Detroit Lions are the only NFC team that has never won or hosted an NFC Championship Game. They appeared in the game in 1991 and again in 2023, losing both times. In the 2023 loss, Detroit scored 31 points, the most ever by a losing team in conference title history, falling to the 49ers 34-31 at Levi's Stadium.

• 5. Records and Extremes

  ›

  The New York Giants have played in five NFC Championship Games and won all five, a perfect record unmatched by any franchise with as many appearances. Two of those wins came in overtime, giving the Giants more overtime NFC Championship victories than any other team.

  Six games in the championship's history have been decided in overtime. The longest of those contests ran 71 minutes and 52 seconds, when the Atlanta Falcons defeated the Minnesota Vikings 30-27 on the 17th of January 1999. Minnesota has lost twice in overtime, more than any other NFC team, falling in the 1998 and 2009 seasons.

  The most lopsided victory belongs to the 2000 season game, when the New York Giants defeated the Minnesota Vikings 41-0 on the 14th of January 2001, a margin of 41 points that stands as the largest in conference championship history. At the other extreme, the narrowest margin came on the 10th of January 1982, when the 49ers edged the Cowboys 28-27, a one-point difference.

  The largest crowd ever to attend an NFC Championship Game gathered at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum on the 4th of January 1976: 88,919 spectators watched the Cowboys beat the Rams 37-7. The 2024 NFC Championship attracted a television audience of 44.2 million viewers, a figure that reflects how central the game remains to the American sports calendar.

• 6. Continuous Contenders

  ›

  Two franchises hold a distinction no other NFC team can claim: the Los Angeles Rams and the Minnesota Vikings are the only teams that have appeared in at least one NFC Championship Game in every decade since 1970. The Rams reached the game in the 1970s, the 1980s, and continued appearing through the 2020s, most recently losing to the Seattle Seahawks 31-27 on the 25th of January 2026. The Vikings have similarly maintained a presence across all six decades of the game's existence, despite winning only three times in nine appearances.

  The Seattle Seahawks carry a different kind of distinction. Because the franchise spent time in both the AFC and the NFC at different points in its history, Seattle holds the unique position of having appeared in both conference championship games, the only NFC team that can make that claim.

  Since the 1975-76 season, the site of the game has been determined by playoff seeding rather than a rotating schedule: the higher-seeded team hosts. A wild card team can only host if both finalists are wild cards, and that situation has never occurred in the game's history. The San Francisco 49ers have hosted eleven times, more than any other franchise, with their most recent home game coming at Levi's Stadium in the 2023 season.