Football

It's already week 12 of the 17-week NFL regular season, but better late than never, right? More specific items will come later, but for now here's an overview of how the pro-football season works:
In the NFL, teams play 16 games, (one game a week) in the regular season and they each have one "bye" (week off). After that comes playoffs, and after that, the superbowl.
The best way to understand who's doing well is to look at their standings. 
Teams are organized into two "conferences" - the AFC (American Football Conference) and the NFC (National Football Conference). These are kind of like the National League and American League in baseball, because usually if a city or area has two different teams (i.e. New York Jets and New York Giants), they're in different conferences:

{San Francisco 49ers are in the NFC}

{Oakland Raiders are in the AFC}

In each Conference, teams are broken up into 4 divisions- in their region (East, West, North & South). There are 4 teams in each division and these are important because the winner of each division goes to the playoffs, along with 2 wildcards (the teams with the best records that didn't win their division). There are 6 teams in each conference in the playoffs, and two rounds of playoffs to narrow down the AFC champion and the NFC champion, who play each other in the Superbowl.