Bye and By

John from Bass Lake brought up the subject of bye weeks in American football. Each NFL team plays 16 games out of 17 weeks in the NFL schedule. The game that they don't play is called their bye week, or open date.

John’s first issue was the proper spelling: should it be bye or by? It turns out that bye is what’s currently used, though it came from the preposition by, the one expressing passing without stopping or contact, thus signifying a state of avoidance.

Bye seems to have started as a cricket term, and it had a meaning quite specific to that game. As it was adopted by other sports as a descriptive term, it signified the team left out in a league with an uneven number of participants after every other team had been paired.

SIDEBAR: Walk on By (Dionne Warwick)

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