SMX Playoffs preview: Why it now matters who finishes 20th

This is one of the fun trickle-down effects of the SuperMotocross World Championship Playoffs. Twentieth has meaning.

The battle for 20th place was a baked-in story line during the television coverage of the final round of the 2025 Pro Motocross Championship at Budds Creek MX Park and its eventual payoff went above and beyond expectations. Budds Creek was also the 28th round of the SuperMotocross World Championship series, the conclusion of the "regular season."

The SMX Playoffs start this weekend at zMax Dragway at Charlotte Motor Speedway. Now in its third running, the importance of the series has settled in with the athletes, which explains why finishing top 20 at the end of the regular season matters; those riders are guaranteed a spot on the starting line for the three-round SMX Playoffs, which travel across the country in successive weekends; Charlotte, St. Louis' The Dome at America's Center and then The Strip at Las Vegas Motor Speedway. The amount of money to be made in the Playoffs, including the $1 million prize to the champion, makes it all that much more important to ensure a spot on the gate.

The 2025 SMX contenders are the survivors

At the top, as the Playoffs begin, Monster Energy Star Racing Yamaha's Justin Cooper is the #1 seed, a position he earned without winning a race in 2025. Not even a Pro Motocross moto. He was, however, the only 450-class rider to line up for every single SX main event and MX moto while everyone else has suffered injuries or illness.

Jett Lawrence, the 22-year-old Australian phenom is the #2 seed, despite missing almost the entire Supercross season with a torn ACL. Now a two-time 450 Pro Motocross champion, the 2024 450 Supercross champion and the two-time and defending 450SMX champion, he's lining up for his third SMX Playoffs run and in his best starting position. In 2024, he was the #6 seed and in 2023 he was the #3 seed. Both years, he still managed to win the championship.

Jett will also battle his abnormally consistent brother, Hunter (#5 seed), fan favorite and veteran Eli Tomac (#7), Chase Sexton (#6), Cooper Webb (#4), Malcolm Stewart (#3), and Ken Roczen (#11) for SMX wins and the title. The SMX #1 plate will, more than likely, go to one of those riders.

But it's the athletes who typically compete further back in the pack who have also been "winners" in a system that rewards showing up each weekend and scoring points. Before the inclusion of the SMX Playoffs, nothing outside the championship points leader mattered much. Now, stories have emerged all over the place and riders who often go overlooked by the TV coverage are getting valuable, and generous, coverage.

And so we return to that aforementioned battle for 20th.

A three-way battle for 20th with only two racers present

Muc-Off ClubMX Yamaha's Coty Schock only needed an 11th place finish in the final moto of the season to punch his ticket, something he'd done 10 times through the summer. But on lap two, he found himself wrapped in, ironically, a mess of Yamaha track banners. He had been running in eighth.

In that same moto, Mitchell Harrison needed a single championship point. Just one! A privateer with Partzilla PRMX Kawasaki, he was the Cinderella story of the season, and he battled (and beat) Jorge Prado, the two-time MXGP champion in moto one. Prado makes more money per week from Monster Energy Kawasaki than Harrison will see from purse money all season. (Why Prado is battling privateers for 10th place is another story for another day.)

So in the final moto, Harrison just needed a 21st place or better and he had a Playoff seeding spot, his first ever in the premier class. With just a few laps to go, however, he suffered a mechanical DNF. He finished the moto in 38th. His fate was now in Schock's hands, who could bump him out.

Maybe you've never heard of Schock, from Delaware, or Harrison, a Michigander and long-time privateer in his first full season of premier class competition. They were battling Justin Hill (who wasn't even at Budds Creek) for the 20th spot in points. Hill didn't race the Pro Motocross season, yet he gathered enough points through the 17-round Monster Energy Supercross series that he seemed safe for a top-20 spot. By the final round of Pro Motocross, however, he was dangerously close to getting bounced.

And he knew it. He watched the Budds Creek event on his phone while navigating his way through an airport. Then the boarding door closed.

"With three laps to go and they made me shut my phone off!" Hill said in a text message. "So, yeah, I was nervous."

The situation was a story teller's dream scenario. Hill owned the tiebreaker over Schock, who owned the tiebreak over Harrison. With Harrison on the sidelines, the TV viewers knew that Schock just needed a 12th place finish to end the season in a three-way tie for 19th (Hill/Schock/Harrison). Harrison would have been the loser (21st) in that situation.

"Talk about a heart drop moment," Harrison told Pulp MX's Steve Matthes after Budds Creek. "Until the last lap, I couldn't breathe."

In the end, Schock clawed back to 15th, three points shy. Hill and Harrison tied for 19th and 20th, the final two seeding SMX positions, which pay three and two championship points to start the post-season. A top 20 also comes with a guarantee of at least $32,200 in race and championship bonuses, a meaningful windfall for Harrison.

Schock's reaction was best summed up in his team's vlog series "The Endless Summer." When a team member offered the best condolences and praise he could muster, Schock offered no response but reciprocated a fist bump and sat in silence, stewing.

Schock, who raced the 250SX West division in Supercross, moved to the premier class for Pro Motocross, won't watch SMX from his couch. He will still have an opportunity to compete in the Playoffs because riders who finish 21st to 30th in points can still earn a spot through a last-chance qualifier. It's a stressful dash of a race where as few as just two riders could be allowed in (if any top 20 rider is absent or injured, more riders are allowed in through the LCQ race but they do not get an automatic top 20 bid). The kicker is that Schock will have to qualify through that LCQ at each of the three rounds.

Nobody wants to be in that race but it’s high drama for the spectators.

In the Playoffs, the payoffs get big

The Playoffs have a unique format. Riders get one race's worth of points based on their seed, so Justin Cooper starts with 25 points before the first race, his reward for season-long consistency. The first race pays regular points, the second pays double points, and the final race at Vegas pays triple points. Because of that unique format, riders such as a Hill, Harrison, and Schock, who enter the post-season far behind the top seeds, can still end the season top 10 overall.

In 2023, the first year of the new system, Colt Nichols spent $25,000 of his own money just to squeak into the top 20 (#19 seed) and then put together a last-minute deal with a privateer Kawasaki team. After three consecutive top 10 finishes, Nichols ended the season ninth overall and put $102,000 in prize money in his pocket.

In 2024, Jett Lawrence missed most of the Pro Motocross championship and came into SMX as the #6 seed. He tied his brother Hunter in the final championship points but clinched the title because he won two of the SMX Finals events (Hunter won Fort Worth). That single point cost Hunter Lawrence $500,000. Jett, meanwhile, grossed $1,225,000 in SMX win and championship bonuses.

Haters of the system still disseminate loud and toxic commentary with regularity. "It's a gimmick, it's just made up…"

Aren't all sports "made up," though? The inclusion of the three-point line in basketball was also deemed a gimmick but, eventually, that outer arc changed how coaches and players strategized.

As a member of the NBC Sports television crew for SMX, I can attest that the inclusion of the Playoffs system opens the door for more story-telling opportunities, especially in that late-summer dead zone where injuries and attrition have historically wrecked the playing field and riders who are out of the title hunt cruise to the season's conclusion.

Injuries still take riders out contention but now they return to action after healing up, rather than waiting until the next calendar year. They want a good seeding position (or a position at all) and some gate drops; there's too much money in the post-season not to.

And riders without a chance of winning the Pro Motocross championship have incentive to charge until the end; seeding points can be worth tens of thousands of dollars by the end of September. For example: At Budds Creek, Malcolm Stewart put in his best ride of the summer and leapt from the #5 seed to #3.

In 2023, the #3 seed won it all…