Thus tournaments with competitors numbering a power of two can have a standard bracket in which all teams are paired up with the loser of each match eliminated and the winner moving on to the next round until only one champion remains.
In postseason tournaments sponsored by the Kansas State High School Activities Association, a team which has a bye is awarded a win.
Seven teams contested the 2012 Connacht Senior Football Championship, so a quarter-final was not played by Mayo.
Mayo therefore advanced directly to the semi-final to await the winner of the game between Leitrim and London.
Another example is the UEFA Europa League, where teams from the highest-ranked nations enter the group stage directly without having to go through qualification.
While not yet confirmed, the ACC are likely to adopt "triple byes" starting in 2025, as membership for the conference will expand beyond 16 teams.
Up until 2020, they were also used for South Korea's LCK, with the top team in their split's regular season automatically making the Final as a result.
Between 1999 and 2001, the NFL had an odd number of teams (31) as a result of the Cleveland Browns re-entering the league.
The league returned to having an even number of teams (32) in 2002 with the addition of the Houston Texans, and implemented the current bye week system.
Historically, bye weeks in the NFL were considered beneficial, providing teams an opportunity to rest and strategize, potentially improving their performance in the subsequent game.
Specifically, a 2011 amendment to the collective bargaining agreement mandated that teams could not use the entire bye week for practice; players were required to have at least four days off.
This change suggests that the previous advantage was not solely due to rest and relaxation but was also influenced by the additional preparation time teams once had.
With the competition expanding to an odd number of teams from the 2023 NRL season, one club is required to have a bye each round.
On the competition ladder, teams are typically awarded two points (equivalent to a win) during their bye week.
This practice is common in Australia, but it is not used in most other countries, to earn an easier passage to the Grand Final as reward for finishing higher on the ladder.
[16] In a variation of the round-robin case, at certain high-level competitions in artistic gymnastics, teams cycle through the apparatuses in an "Olympic Order" with scheduled byes in between.
[18] In each of these nine sextets, each team competes during four of six "rotations" with the other two as byes – scheduled before the uneven bars and the floor exercise.
FIDE specifies that "pairing-allocated" byes in their sanctioned chess tournaments may not be awarded multiple times to the same participant.
Contrasting use in some single-elimination brackets, the byes are to be allocated to the lowest-rated eligible player in the pool.