Why is it called bye in football

In the NFL, each team has one week off during a seventeen week schedule during which they play sixteen games. This is a great thing for players and coaches to rest up in the midst of a very physically and mentally challenging season. When organized this way, a bye week is an equitable way of rewarding all teams with the same amount of rest.

In tournaments and playoffs, a bye week rewards a team or player by guaranteeing entry to a future round of play. If you wanted to design a tournament or playoff without byes, you would start at the finals two teams and go back: semifinals four teams, quarterfinals eight teams, the round before that sixteen teams , and again thirty-two, once more sixty-four.

Choose a number from those and you can have everyone play the same number of rounds. If, instead of four teams, you want to start with six, one easy way of handling it is to have two games four teams while two teams wait to play the winners of those games in the next round.

This gives you two rounds of four teams each, followed by a final with two teams. In that game, it referred not to one scheduled without an opponent, but a run scored on a ball that is missed by the wicket-keeper.

Given that news writers tasked with covering one sport cricket might have also been assigned to cover other sports such as coursing , it is not hard to imagine why they would have preferred the spelling that was already familiar from cricket.

So now we have byes and bye weeks for all sorts of sports and games. Biden rolls out vaccination effort. Subscribe to America's largest dictionary and get thousands more definitions and advanced search—ad free! Log in Sign Up. Why are they leaving? Where are they going? What to Know In sports, bye refers to a team automatically advancing to the next round of tournament play without competing and bye week refers to a scheduled off week for a given team. The bye week, featuring professional armchair quarterbacks.

More Words At Play. Biden: Vaccine 'Mandates'. Merriam-Webster's Words of the Week - Oct. Time Traveler. Love words? Need even more definitions? Best Answer. Study guides. Q: What is the origin of term bye in football? Write your answer Related questions. What is the origin of the term buh bye? What is the origin of a football?

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