Season (sports) - Regular Season

Regular Season

In almost every sport the term "regular season" would refer to the sport's league competition. In most countries the league is played in a double round-robin format, where every team plays every other team twice, once at their home venue, and once away at the oppositions venue as visitors. The results over all games are accumulated and when every team has completed its full schedule of games, a winner is declared.

In addition to the regular season league competition, many sports also operate an elimination cup tournament. A cup tournament can either take the form of a league cup, where members of a league competition are seeded using their standings from the previous year, or an association cup which is open to teams playing the sport at all levels providing they are affiliated to the National body for that sport. These competitions usually run alongside the regular league competitions, though often there is a small overlap where the cup either begins slightly before or ends slightly after the regular season. It is not uncommon for the cup final to be held the week after the last games of the league.

In such a set-up it is usual for the top division teams to be given a bye into the last few rounds while the smaller teams are randomly drawn against each other in the early rounds. This set-up allows for the possibility of relative minnows and small-town teams to become giant-killers and eliminate one of the big Nationally recognised clubs from the competition.

In North American, and some Australian sports, the cup tournament is held immediately after rather than during the regular season and using the seedings from it. These cup competitions are known as playoffs and in all four major US sports, winning the cup final (Super Bowl, World Series, NBA Finals and Stanley Cup) is vastly more important than winning the league.

This may be in part due to the unusual way in which North American sports leagues are scheduled. Rather than every team playing all others twice, teams may play more games against local rivals than teams in other parts of the country. For example, the NBA's Los Angeles Lakers will play the Los Angeles Clippers (a team within their division, a sub division of the conference)four times in a regular season, while both will only play the Boston Celtics, who are in the opposite Eastern Conference, twice. Part of this is due to the vast geographic distances between some teams in North America - measured in a straight line Los Angeles is 2,606 miles (4,194 kilometers) from Boston, for instance - and a desire to limit travel expenses. In the scheduling system used in the NFL, it is possible for two teams to only meet every four years. Major League Baseball has the most un even schedules of all the four major North American sports. In MLB the conferences are called leagues instead, but have exactly the same effect as conferences(as with all North American sports leagues, leagues, conferences and division are not based on skill, but instead geography, history and rivalries). Teams play 19 games against each of teams in their own division each year but will only play 18 games total against all of the teams in the other league. Because each of the interleague matchups are part of a 3 game series, teams will play no games at all against most teams from the other league.