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Play-offs
The playoffs, play-offs, postseason or finals of a sports league are a competition played after the regular season by the top competitors to determine the league champion or a similar accolade. Depending on the league, the playoffs may be either a single game, a series of games, or a tournament, and may use a single-elimination system or one of several other different playoff formats. Playoff, in regard to international fixtures, is to qualify or progress to the next round of a competition or tournament. In team sports in the U.S. and Canada, the vast distances and consequent burdens on cross-country travel have led to regional divisions of teams. Generally, during the regular season, teams play more games in their division than outside it, but the league's best teams might not play against each other in the regular season. Therefore, in the postseason a playoff series is organized. Any group-winning team is eligible to participate, and as playoffs became more popular they were ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
EFL Championship
The English Football League Championship (often referred to as the Championship for short or the Sky Bet Championship for sponsorship purposes) is the highest division of the English Football League (EFL) and second-highest overall in the English football league system, after the Premier League. The league is contested by 24 clubs. Introduced for the 2004–05 season as the Football League Championship the division was previously known as the Football League Second Division ( 1892– 1992) and Football League First Division ( 1992– 2004). The winning club of the Championship receives the EFL Championship trophy, the same trophy that was awarded to English First Division champions from 1892 until 1992. As in other divisions of professional English football, Welsh clubs can be part of the division, making it a cross-border league. Each season, the two top-finishing teams in the Championship are automatically promoted to the Premier League. The teams that finish the season ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Premier League
The Premier League (legal name: The Football Association Premier League Limited) is the highest level of the men's English football league system. Contested by 20 clubs, it operates on a system of promotion and relegation with the English Football League (EFL). Seasons typically run from August to May with each team playing 38 matches (playing all 19 other teams both home and away). Most games are played on Saturday and Sunday afternoons, with occasional weekday evening fixtures. The competition was founded as the FA Premier League on 20 February 1992 following the decision of clubs in the Football League First Division to break away from the Football League, founded in 1888, and take advantage of a lucrative television rights sale to Sky. From 2019 to 2020, the league's accumulated television rights deals were worth around £3.1 billion a year, with Sky and BT Group securing the domestic rights to broadcast 128 and 32 games respectively. The Premier League is a corp ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Playoff Format
There are a number of formats used in various levels of competition in sports and games to determine an overall champion. Some of the most common are the ''single elimination'', the ''best-of-'' series, the ''total points series'' more commonly known as ''on aggregate'', and the '' round-robin tournament''. Single elimination A single-elimination ("knockout") playoff pits the participants in one-game matches, with the loser being dropped from the competition. Single-elimination tournaments are often used in individual sports like tennis. In most tennis tournaments, the players are seeded against each other, and the winner of each match continues to the next round, all the way to the final. When a playoff of this type involves the top four teams, it is sometimes known as the Shaughnessy playoff system, after Frank Shaughnessy, who first developed it for the International League of minor league baseball. Variations of the Shaughnessy system also exist, such as in the promotion ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Single-elimination Tournament
A single-elimination, knockout, or sudden death tournament is a type of elimination tournament where the loser of each match-up is immediately eliminated from the tournament. Each winner will play another in the next round, until the final match-up, whose winner becomes the tournament champion. Each match-up may be a single match or several, for example two-legged ties in European sports or best-of series in American pro sports. Defeated competitors may play no further part after losing, or may participate in "consolation" or "classification" matches against other losers to determine the lower final rankings; for example, a third place playoff between losing semi-finalists. In a shootout poker tournament, there are more than two players competing at each table, and sometimes more than one progressing to the next round. Some competitions are held with a pure single-elimination tournament system. Others have many phases, with the last being a single-elimination final stage, ofte ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Regular Season
In an organized sports league, a typical season is the portion of one year in which regulated games of the sport are in session: for example, in Major League Baseball the season lasts approximately from the last week of March to the last week of September. In other team sports, like association football or basketball, it is generally from August or September to May although in some countries - such as Northern Europe or East Asia - the season starts in the spring and finishes in autumn, mainly due to weather conditions encountered during the winter. A year can often be broken up into several distinct sections (sometimes themselves called seasons). These are: a preseason, a series of exhibition games played for training purposes; a regular season, the main period of the league's competition; the postseason, a playoff tournament played against the league's top teams to determine the league's champion; and the offseason, the time when there is no official competition. Preseason ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Promotion And Relegation
In sports leagues, promotion and relegation is a process where teams are transferred between multiple divisions based on their performance for the completed season. Leagues that use promotion and relegation systems are often called open leagues. In a system of promotion and relegation, the best-ranked team(s) in the lower division are ''promoted'' to the higher division for the next season, and the worst-ranked team(s) in the higher division are ''relegated'' to the lower division for the next season. In some leagues, playoffs or qualifying rounds are also used to determine rankings. This process can continue through several levels of divisions, with teams being exchanged between adjacent divisions. During the season, teams that are high enough in the league table that they would qualify for promotion are sometimes said to be in the ''promotion zone'', and those at the bottom are in the ''relegation zone'' or Reg zone ( colloquially the ''drop zone'' or ''facing the drop''). A ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Bowl Game
In North America, a bowl game is one of a number of post-season college football games that are primarily played by teams belonging to the NCAA's Division I Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS). For most of its history, the Division I Bowl Subdivision had avoided using a playoff tournament to determine an annual national champion, which was instead traditionally determined by a vote of sports writers and other non-players. In place of such a playoff, various cities across the United States developed their own regional festivals featuring post-season college football games. Prior to 2002, bowl game statistics were not included in players' career totals. Despite attempts to establish a permanent system to determine the FBS national champion on the field (such as the Bowl Coalition from 1992 to 1994, the Bowl Alliance from 1995 to 1997, the Bowl Championship Series from 1998 to 2013, and the College Football Playoff from 2014 to the present), various bowl games continue to be he ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Houston Texans
The Houston Texans are a professional American football team based in Houston. The Texans compete in the National Football League (NFL) as a member club of the American Football Conference (AFC) South division, and play their home games at NRG Stadium. The Texans were founded in 1999, and were owned by Bob McNair until his death in 2018; following McNair's death, the majority ownership of the team went to his wife, Janice. The team replaced the city's previous NFL franchise, the Houston Oilers, who played from 1960 to 1996 before moving to Nashville and eventually becoming the Tennessee Titans. The Texans began play as an expansion team in , making them the youngest franchise currently competing in the NFL. While the Texans mainly struggled in the 2000s, their fortunes would take a turn for the better in the 2010s when they first found success in the 2011 season, winning their first division championship and clinching their first playoff berth. The Texans have gone on to ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Super Bowl
The Super Bowl is the annual final playoff game of the National Football League (NFL) to determine the league champion. It has served as the final game of every NFL season since 1966, replacing the NFL Championship Game. Since 2022, the game is played on the second Sunday in February. Prior Super Bowls were played on Sundays in early to mid-January from 1967 to 1978, late January from 1979 to 2003, and the first Sunday of February from 2004 to 2021. Winning teams are awarded the Vince Lombardi Trophy, named for the coach who won the first two Super Bowls. Due to the NFL restricting use of its "Super Bowl" trademark, it is frequently referred to as the "big game" or other generic terms by non-sponsoring corporations. The day the game is played is often referred to as " Super Bowl Sunday" or simply "Super Sunday". The game was created as part of a 1966 merger agreement between the NFL and the competing American Football League (AFL) to have their best teams compete for a c ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
College Football
College football (french: Football universitaire) refers to gridiron football played by teams of student athletes. It was through college football play that American football in the United States, American football rules first gained popularity in the United States. Unlike most other sports in North America, no official minor league farm team, farm organizations exist in American or Canadian football. Therefore, college football is generally considered to be the second tier of American and Canadian football; one step ahead of High school football, high school competition, and one step below professional competition (the National Football League, NFL). In some areas of the US, especially the South and the Midwest, college football is more popular than professional football, and for much of the 20th century college football was seen as more prestigious. A player's performance in college football directly impacts his chances of playing professional football. The best collegiate ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Sports League
A sports league is a group of sports teams or individual athletes that compete against each other and gain points in a specific sport. At its simplest, it may be a local group of amateur athletes who form teams among themselves and compete on weekends; at its most complex, it can be an international professional league making large amounts of money and involving dozens of teams and thousands of players. Terminology Synonyms In many cases, organizations that function as leagues are described using a different term, such as association, conference, division, leaderboard, or series. This is especially common in individual sports, although the term "league" is sometimes used in amateur individual sports such as golf. The term "league" is also sometimes applicable to competitions that would more traditionally be called tournaments, such as the UEFA Champions League, which is organized with multiple small round-robin competitions followed by a single elimination tournament to cho ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
College Football National Championships In NCAA Division I FBS
A national championship in the highest level of college football in the United States, currently the NCAA Division I Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS), is a designation awarded annually by various organizations to their selection of the best college football team. Division I FBS football is the only National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) sport for which the NCAA does not sanction a yearly championship event. As such, it is sometimes unofficially referred to as a " mythical national championship". Due to the lack of an official NCAA title, determining the nation's top college football team has often engendered controversy. A championship team is independently declared by multiple individuals and organizations, often referred to as "selectors". These choices are not always unanimous. In 1969 even President of the United States Richard Nixon made a selection by announcing, ahead of the season-ending "game of the century" between No. 1 Texas and No. 2 Arkansas, that the winn ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
