Pet peeve #435: It’s not their “bye week”

As long as I’m on the subject of pet peeves, allow me to share another one briefly. We are in the middle of another NFL football season, and the pet peeve I describe here has to do with a specific word that I hear used all of the time during the season.

The word is “bye.” Not “bye” as in “good-bye,” but rather, as it relates to sports schedules. In the NFL, each team has one Sunday off during the regular season. The week varies for each team. For instance, this coming Sunday, four teams do not play (the Detroit Lions, Indianapolis Colts, New York Jets, and Houston Texans). The following week, four other teams are off, etc. This scheduling template has been used by the NFL for years.

The problem that I have is that for years now, whether it’s athletes or sportscasters or sports journalists or casual fans, I generally hear people refer to a team’s off week as their “bye week.” If you are a football fan, you’ve no doubt heard it a million times. “The Steelers are 5-2 going into their bye week” or “Who do the Falcons play this week? . . . Oh, it’s their bye week.”

And as is the case with most of my pet peeves, for years I suffered silently (up until recently, that is, when I can now blog about them!). Externally I grinned and carried on with the conversation, or with watching the telecast, or with listening to the sports talk radio program. But internally, I screamed, “IT’S NOT A BYE! THAT’S NOT WHAT THE MEANING OF ‘BYE’ IS!”

Let’s go to the dictionary.

Webster’s: A bye is “a position of a participant in a tournament who has no opponent after pairs are drawn and advances to the next round without playing.”

Dictionary.com: Bye: “in a tournament, the preferential status of a player or team not paired with a competitor in an early round and thus automatically advanced to play in the next round.”

The NFL regular season schedule gives each team a week off, not a bye. A bye has to do with automatically advancing in a tournament. Venus Williams might get a bye in the first round at Wimbledon, but the Detroit Lions do not have a bye this weekend. They just have the week off. Yet the use of “bye” is nearly universally accepted as valid to describe these off weeks. In fact, I just went to ESPN’s website to check out the NFL schedule, and sure enough, they use the term “bye” when listing the teams not playing on given Sundays.

I think the main reason I have this particular peeve is that I was a wrestler in high school, and an average one at that. As such, I often had to wrestle against a comparable opponent in the first round of a tournament. If I won, I inevitably would then have to face the top wrestler in my weight class in the second round. And more often than not, he was coming off of a bye, i.e. there were not enough wrestlers to match everyone up with a first-round opponent, so the top wrestler was not paired with an opponent and thus advanced to the next round without wrestling . . . the textbook definition of a bye!

And, more often than not, I would get manhandled in the second round of these tournaments. Having come off of a hard-fought win, I would go up against the fresh top-seeded guy, and I didn’t stand much of a chance. Those were painful matches, but looking back, at least I can say that they forever cemented in my mind the meaning of the word “bye.”