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Manual Playoff Seeding & Editing a Schedule Mid-Season (Removing a Team, Byes & Error Messages)

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Overview

This article covers two related situations that come up late in a season: (1) manually seeding a playoff bracket so you can leave out teams that opt out of playoffs, and (2) removing a team from a schedule that is already partway through, including how to handle byes and the error messages you may see.

Part 1: Manually seeding the playoff bracket to exclude teams

If some teams decide not to continue into the playoffs, you must seed the bracket manually so you can leave those teams out. A bracket set to By Standings auto-populates from the standings and does not let you choose which teams are included.

  1. Go to Schedules > Leagues & Divisions and select the Division.
  2. Go to the 1 Configuration > Scheduling page.
  3. Set the Playoff Seeding (Playoff Seed Method) to Manual.
  4. Click Save.
  5. Go to the 4 Create Schedule > Playoff page for the bracket.
  6. Manually select only the teams that are participating in the playoffs. Simply leave out the teams that are opting out.
  7. Click Calc & Save to save the updated bracket.

Only the teams you select will be seeded into the playoff schedule.

If the bracket was already built (games already scheduled) while set to By Standings, you may need to delete the existing playoff schedule and recreate it in Manual mode with the correct teams. If games have already been scored, you must first remove those scores on the Division's Standings page (Edit Scores) before the playoff schedule can be deleted.

Tip: If you also want to leave a top-finishing team out (for example, not putting the 1st-place team into the playoffs), Manual seeding is the way to do it — just don't select that team when choosing bracket teams.

Part 2: Removing a team mid-season

How you remove a team depends on whether it has already played any games.

If the team has NOT played any games yet

You can remove the team directly. A team can only be removed from a Division if it is not scheduled, so first delete or reassign any of its scheduled games, then remove the team from the 2 Teams page.

If the team HAS already played games

Do not simply delete the team — deleting it will alter the standings for the other teams. Instead, follow the full Removing a team after a schedule has started process, which has you rebuild the schedule in a new Division so the games that were actually played are preserved. In summary:

  1. Create a new Division with the same configurations (do not delete the old Division yet).
  2. On the 2 Teams page, use Add Placeholders to add the number of teams that will remain.
  3. Add Time Slots and create the new schedule.
  4. Rename the placeholder teams to the teams that actually played.
  5. Edit the game rows so the early weeks reflect the games that actually happened, and enter those scores.

  6. Delete the old Division and make the new one active.

    Full instructions here.

To reduce disruption to the remaining teams for the current/upcoming week, you can also either swap another team in so a team plays twice, or delete the affected game so both teams get a bye for that week.

Handling byes left behind by a removed team

When a team is removed, its former opponents may show a bye (or a bye labeled N/A if the removed team's slot is now empty).

  • To hide byes entirely: go to 1 Configuration > Display and set Show Byes to No.

Error messages when editing the schedule

You may see warnings when editing a mid-season schedule:

  • Yellow warning messages — informational (for example, when a new Division shares Time Slots with the old Division that still exists). These do not block saving.
  • Critical (red) errors — these DO block saving; you cannot save any schedule changes while a critical error is present. A common cause is unresolved placeholder/possible-opponent slots. In that case, create individual teams for each placeholder and replace them before saving.

Possibly related existing articles:

  • Removing a team after a schedule has started — https://support.teamsideline.com/hc/en-us/articles/210781663-Removing-a-team-after-a-schedule-has-started
  • How to make a Playoff Bracket — https://support.teamsideline.com/hc/en-us/articles/201152257-How-to-make-a-Playoff-Bracket
  • How to build a Manual Playoff Schedule — https://support.teamsideline.com/hc/en-us/articles/115001065886-How-to-build-a-Manual-Playoff-Schedule
  • Why isn't my playoff bracket updating? — https://support.teamsideline.com/hc/en-us/articles/115002951943-Why-isn-t-my-playoff-bracket-updating