Many American sports leagues give first-round playoff byes to the top teams as they enter their playoffs… but do the byes actually work? 

  On one hand, teams like the Kansas City Chiefs have used the break to recover and power themselves to multiple Super Bowls. On the other hand, you have teams like Inter Miami and St. Louis City Soccer Club who have seemingly lost momentum before crashing out against much lower-ranked teams.

  I examined the playoffs of Major League Soccer and the National Football League over the past four years. I chose those two because they kept a consistent first-place team bye system over that period. What I found was that out of a total of 16 teams with first-round byes, six teams have made the championship, seven have lost in the first round and just three teams have lost in between.

  This data shows some fairly clear trends. First of all, the rate of losing in their first round is almost 50%. This happens even though teams with byes are playing statistically weaker teams in the first round. This would seem to point towards the bye being at least something of a risk. However, almost half of the teams that advance go on to at least make the championship game. 

  The rate of losing in the first round clearly shows that there are some significant risks as well as some benefits to getting a first-round bye. On one hand, leagues like MLS have had top teams consistently crash out of the first round, including Lionel Messi’s Inter Miami, since adopting their new playoff system. On the other hand, one out of every two, or four out of eight, first-placed teams in each of the last NFL playoffs have made it to the Super Bowl, showing there can clearly be some boons to it as well. 

  So do byes actually work? It seems to depend on the league. For some leagues like MLS, byes seem almost like a curse, with only two teams making the final and four going out in their first round. In fact, outside of the anomaly year of 2022, where both first seeds made the final, you have to go back to 2017 to find another example of a first seed making the final in the MLS. However, in the NFL, as mentioned previously, a first-placed team seems to make it almost every year, suggesting that a first-round bye seems to have at least some benefits there.