Playoffs
In the EFL Championship (the second tier of English football), teams finishing 3rd to 6th after the regular season compete to decide the third promotion spot to the Premier League.
The Buffalo and Rochester metropolitan areas each played a final, the winners of which would advance to the "New York Pro Championship" on Thanksgiving weekend.
The game is played at a neutral site, determined through bids by prospective host cities (similarly to the Super Bowl and NCAA final four).
[7] The new College Football Playoff National Championship Trophy is sponsored by Dr Pepper, which paid an estimated $35 million for the sponsorship rights through 2020.
Prior to 1973, four regional bowl games were played in order to provide postseason action for what was then called the "NCAA College Division" and a poll determined the final champion.
In leagues with a single table done only once a year, as in most of Europe, playoff systems are not used to determine champions,[11] although in some countries such systems are used to determine teams to be promoted to higher leagues (e.g., England) or qualifiers for European club competitions (such as Greece and the Netherlands), usually between teams that didn't perform well enough to earn an automatic spot.
[citation needed][globalize] In international football, playoffs were a feature of the 1954 and 1958 FIFA World Cup final tournaments.
From the league's inception through the 2008–09 season, the top four teams advanced to the finals series, employed using a modified Page playoff system.
The fourth ranked team (or fifth, when the cup holder is already qualified for European football) plays a knock-out match against the winner of play-off 2.
The use of play-offs to decide promotion issues returned to the League in 1986 with the desire to reduce the number of mid-table clubs with nothing to play for at the end of the season.
At level six, the play-off semi-finals are two leg ties with the final being a single match played at the home ground of the highest placed of the two teams.
It was a controversial proposal — some people did not believe a club finishing only in eighth position in the League could (or should) compete in the Premiership while others found the system too American for their liking.
In both rounds, if the tie is level on aggregate after extra time in the second leg, the team that finished higher in the league standings wins.
In the case of ties after regulation in any round, 30 minutes of extra time (divided into two 15-minute periods) would be played followed by a penalty-kick shootout, if necessary, to determine the winners.
The defunct Women's Professional Soccer (WPS), which operated only in the U.S., conducted a four-team stepladder tournament consisting of one-off knockout matches.
If two teams had finished with equal records, a playoff match for the premiership was required: this occurred in the Challenge Cup in 1871, the South Australian Inter-club competition in 1874, the SAFA in 1889 and 1894, and in the VFA in 1896.
However, the plural term "playoffs" is conventionally used by fans and media to refer to baseball's postseason tournament, not including the World Series.
Before the 2021 reorganization of MiLB, most leagues at the Triple-A, Double-A, and Class A-Advanced classification levels included four qualifying teams which competed in two best-of-five rounds: semi-finals and finals.
The Big South Conference holds its first round at campus sites, gives hosting rights for its quarterfinals and semifinals to the regular-season champion, and plays its final at the home court of the top remaining seed.
There are a number of T20 leagues played in cricket for a few weeks each in many countries, which all generally follow some variation of the Page playoff system, and have 8 teams.
The National Hockey League playoff system is an elimination tournament competition for the Stanley Cup, consisting of four rounds of best-of-seven series.
For the 2019–20, in which the regular season was prematurely ended by the COVID-19 pandemic only the top four teams in each conference, as determined by points-per-game, qualified directly to the First Round of the Stanley Cup Playoffs.
The Kontinental Hockey League, based in Russia and including teams from several nearby countries, operates a playoff system similar to that of the NHL, also consisting of four rounds of single-elimination best-of-seven series.
Brian France explained why NASCAR made the changes to the chase: "The adjustments taken [Monday] put a greater emphasis on winning races.
Previously, the term play-off was used in the NSWRL and BRL competitions to describe matches which were played as tie breakers to determine qualification for the finals series.
[27] The highest level of French rugby union, the Top 14, expanded its playoffs starting with the 2009–10 season from a four-team format to six teams.
After the 2020–21 season, both South African sides left the league and were replaced by the country's four former Super Rugby franchises, with the competition being rebranded as the URC.
The top eight teams advance to knockout playoffs, with the higher seed hosting all matches leading up to the championship final, which continues to be held at a predetermined site.
The New Zealand Rugby Union (NZRU) ultimately decided to stay with the previous format for the rebranded 2010 ITM Cup, with the same four-team playoff as in 2009.
Because the 2011 season ran up against that year's Rugby World Cup in New Zealand, the competition window was truncated, with only the top two teams in each division advancing to the final match.
