Bye (sports)

A bye in sports and other competitive activities can have two different meanings. First, in leagues where almost all teams play on the same days, the team (or teams) that does not play on that day is said to be on bye. (In sports that play weekly, especially gridiron football, a team that does not play at all during the week is said to be on its "bye week," but if they play on another day of the week, e.g. Monday or Thursday, they are not), which is really a corruption of the older sense of the term "bye" in the context of tournament play.

In the traditional and more common usage, a bye is the practice of allowing a player or team to advance to the next round of a single-elimination tournament (or the winners bracket of a double-elimination tournament) without playing. It is always necessary to grant byes when the number of entrants in the competition is not a power of two (i.e., not 2, 4, 8, 16, etc.); any such tournament without a power of two in a given round must grant the number of byes to indicated by the difference in order to complete the field. In a seeded tournament, the byes are granted to the top seeds, whereas in an unseeded tournament the byes are usually awarded by random draw. For instance, the NCAA Basketball Tournament must grant 63 byes for its "play-in" round, since it has 65 participants (128-65) and had to grant 16 first-round byes when it had 48 participants (64-48). Each of the NFL conferences playoff first rounds must grant two, since there are six teams each (8-6), which only confuses matters since they also use the term "bye weeks" to refer to what really should be called "scheduled off weeks" during the regular season. Both of the NCAA tournament and the NFL post-season (not the regular season) are seeded, single-elimination tournaments, so the highest-seeded participants are granted the necessary (single-elimination tournament) byes.

In round-robin tournament competitions where there are an odd number of competitors each round, usually one gets a bye; there is never a round where all teams play. However, by the completion of the tournament each team plays the same number of games as well as sitting out for the same number of rounds during the tournament. In a Swiss-system tournament with an odd number of players, one gets a bye each round, but not all players will get a bye. However, as with the case of NFL "bye weeks", these "byes" do not confer any advantage, or in the case of a seeded tournament, that any player/team receiving one is perceived as any better than one that does not, as all of the participants receive one, whereas the awarding of a bye in a single-elimination tournament most definitely does, in both cases.