Elimination from postseason contention

This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Find sources: "Elimination from postseason contention" – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR (January 2012) (Learn how and when to remove this message)

Elimination from postseason contention, or being eliminated from playoff contention, refers to the point when it is no longer mathematically possible for a sports team to qualify for their league's annual postseason, regardless of the outcomes of the team and the team(s) they are trailing. This occurs when the number of wins combined with losses of higher-ranking teams in the league or division required to reach first place in the division or a wild card spot (where applicable) exceeds the number of the remaining games on the team's schedule.

The concept of being "eliminated from postseason contention" is applicable to sports leagues and programs where qualifying requires a first-place finish or at-large bid (i.e., a "wild card" spot). It does not apply to certain sports leagues, often (but not always) for some high school and college-level sports where all teams participate in the playoffs or conference tournament, regardless of record. It also does not strictly apply to those sports that do not have a postseason or whose postseason criteria are too subjective to determine until the selectors make their decisions (this is especially true in American college sports, where teams in the five most lucrative and reputed athletic conferences are regularly awarded invitational bids to postseason tournaments even if they would otherwise have been eliminated had they been in a mid-major conference).