The NASCAR playoffs get right what another league gets wrong

It's the second and final off weekend of the 2026 NASCAR Cup Series season, and both IndyCar and Formula 1 are also in the midst of their own summer breaks. So forgive me for the "slow news week" vibe here, but this is also the perfect time to address a personal pet peeve in the world of sports that I've admittedly discussed on a few occasions before.

NASCAR does have a tendency to overcomplicate things to varying degrees with a number of head-scratching gimmicks, but this is one thing they're actually doing right, while another major sports league inexplicably remains incapable of doing so.

The Cup Series postseason (playoffs, Chase, whatever you want to call it; we really do not care here) is right around the corner, with just four races remaining until the end of the regular season.

The 16 playoff spots are set to go to the top 16 drivers in the point standings, after "win and in" was removed as a part of NASCAR's postseason rework. The new system brought an end to the knockout-style format that was in effect from 2014 to 2025.

It has never been easier to track the postseason cut line, in terms of who is safe and who is not. Drivers above the cut line are measured in terms of how far ahead they are of the 17th place driver, the top driver below the cutoff, while drivers below it are measured in terms of how far behind they are of the 16th place driver, the final driver above it.

As things stand, before the races at Iowa Speedway, Richmond Raceway, New Hampshire Motor Speedway, and Daytona International Speedway (pictured) to conclude the 26-race regular season, Team Penske's Austin Cindric sits 16th in points and is 38 points above the cut line. RFK Racing's Ryan Preece is 17th and therefore 38 points below it.

Using MLB's method, Cindric would be classified as zero points above the cut line, despite having a 38-point cushion.

MLB gets wrong what NASCAR gets right

Using this same method, 15th place Shane van Gisbergen would be listed at +19, even though he actually has a 57-point buffer, which would make zero sense.

Take a look at the top five teams in the American League Wild Card standings; for those not familiar with baseball, the top three teams in each league that don't win their division earn playoff berths as Wild Card teams.

GB (games back) is calculated by taking the average of the difference in wins and the difference in losses. For the teams below the cutoff, GB is appropriately measured in relation to the last team above the cutoff.

But for the teams above the cutoff, theirs are inexplicably calculated in relation to the same team. The third Wild Card team will always be zero games to the good, even if they're 10 games ahead of the top team below the cutoff, which is the gap that actually matters.

Take Boston. Yes, they're 1.5 games ahead of Cleveland. But if they drop below Cleveland, they'd still be in; the third spot doesn't just disappear into thin air like the Yankees do in October. They're really 2.5 games to the good, since that's their gap to Houston, and Houston is the top team below the cut line; just do the math.

Same deal with the Yankees; they're actually seven games up on Houston, so they're seven games to the good, not six. The gap to Cleveland doesn't matter in terms of dropping out of the top three.

If MLB used NASCAR's (correct) version to determine each team's gap to the cut line, the AL Wild Card standings would actually look like this.

New York, Boston, and Cleveland are indeed 7.0, 2.5, and 1.0 games to the good, respectively, when it comes to staying inside that top three.

The way MLB expresses the Wild Card standings is just goofy and can be more confusing than helpful. Then again, it's also hard to take certain elements of baseball seriously to begin with, until Armando Galarraga's "imperfect" game is overturned. But I digress.

Or maybe I'm goofy for thinking it matters, because at the end of the day, it doesn't actually affect who gets in and who doesn't, and it's not hard to manually calculate each provisional Wild Card team's true gap to the cutoff anyway.

Or maybe it's a little bit of both. Again, no races this weekend.

Either way, thankfully NASCAR does it the right way, and the gaps that actually matter are the gaps that are shown in the playoff standings.