Championship standings straight from the same dataset the app reads, alongside our editorial calls — and the scorecards grading those calls once the round has been run.
Auto-generated from the same dataset the app reads: the final playoff standings, with what each of the three rounds actually paid. We do not publish win probabilities for this series. A three-round championship with escalating multipliers and a reset grid is not something our data supports modelling, and the rates this block used to show were history from a different format. Ranked by championship position.
There is no next round to preview. All three 2026 championships are settled, so this page is now the record of what we called and how it turned out.
Ken Roczen took the 450 Supercross title by three points, Hunter Lawrence took Pro Motocross by two, and Jorge Prado took the SMX World Championship by seven. Three 450 titles, three different winners, and none of the three margins reached ten points. In the 250 class Cole Davies won 250SX East and the outdoor championship, and Levi Kitchen took the SMX title Davies had been favourite for. Supercross returns in January.
Across the three scorecards below — Budds Creek, SMX Playoff 1 and the SMX Final — we called thirty top-five places and hit nineteen, 63%. The 450 class ran 12 of 15; the 250 ran 7 of 15, and every 250 scorecard was our worse half. That is the honest summary: we read the premier class reasonably and the 250 class badly, and the single worst call of the year (Cole Davies to win SMX Playoff 1, where he finished tenth) and the single best (Davies to podium the Final, where he swept it) were the same rider six weeks apart.
The forecast block that used to head this page was withdrawn during the playoffs because its numbers contradicted our own results. Nothing has replaced it. Building a probability model for a three-round championship with escalating multipliers and a reset grid remains an open piece of work, and the off-season is when it should be done rather than asserted.
The running record of our editorial calls. New scorecards get added here, oldest at the bottom.
Holeshot pick, Jorge Prado: hit, in the moto that mattered. Deegan led Moto 1 from the gate; Prado took the Moto 2 holeshot and held Deegan off to win the race and the championship. Both holeshots are described in the race reports, so unlike Playoff 1 this one is gradeable.
Sleeper pick, Garrett Marchbanks: miss. We said a top five would be a correction rather than an upset. He went 10-7 for seventh, the same position he took at Carson, so not even an improvement on his own previous round.
Variance flag, "nobody has a reference for this track": hit. Rain arrived before the motos, the rider who had been 10th and 14th in the playoffs swept both 250 motos, and the 450 round went to a rider who had not won since Columbus. An unfamiliar surface did what we said it would, which is mostly a reminder that the flag was cheap to make.
Key Question 1, "can Prado ride for third?": he never had to answer it. He rode for the win in Moto 2, took it, and finished second overall — comfortably clear of the podium he needed. The question assumed a defensive ride and he did the opposite.
Key Question 2, "does the outdoor round undo the seeding's bias?": no. Roczen, seeded tenth on 12 points for skipping the outdoor season, finished fourth at the most outdoor round of the three and fourth in the championship. We said that if he won it the seeding argument was over. He did not, so it is not.
Key Question 3, "is three points a lead or a rounding error?": neither, in the end. Kitchen finished second and DiFrancesco seventh, so the margin that was going to decide the title never came into play and Kitchen won by 24. The scenario we spent most words on was the one that did not happen.
Key Question 4, "what does Cole Davies do with the year?": he won the last race of it by six seconds and took third in the championship, one point behind DiFrancesco. Two titles, a swept finale, and the SMX championship he was favourite for finishing third. The playoffs did not expose him; two bad afternoons did.
Nothing was published ahead of Carson, so there is nothing to grade for it — the site went two rounds without updating, and inventing a scorecard for picks that were never on the page would be worse than saying so. The Playoff 1 grading below was also published late, on the day of the Final, rather than the weekend it was raced. That is a gap in the record, not a run of correct calls.
Sleeper pick, Eli Tomac: miss. We said a partial season usually understates a rider; he went 15-13 for 14th, worse than the fifth he took at Ironman, and has since gone ninth at Carson.
Holeshot pick: none was made for Playoff 1, so there is nothing to grade.
Variance flag, the triple-points Final: hit, and it is the one thing on the page that has aged well. We wrote "expect the standings after Playoff 1 to mislead." The rider who won Playoff 1 is now second, the rider who was 15th is tied with him on 76, and the championship leader won neither moto at either round.
Key Question 1, who inherits Jett Lawrence's absence: answered, and not by the rider we leaned toward. We ranked Prado, Deegan, Roczen and Webb in that order for the vacancy. Prado leads the championship, but the rider who has most visibly taken the space is Haiden Deegan, who won the round Jett would have started favourite for and who we had third. Hunter Lawrence, whom we put first, has spent the playoffs recovering from his own opening round rather than inheriting anything.
Holeshot pick, Jorge Prado: not graded. We could not find a holeshot record for either Budds Creek 450 moto in the published results, and we are not going to score a pick we cannot check. Sleeper, Mark Fineis: miss. The test we set was whether he would improve on his Round 9 finish; he went from 14th at Unadilla to 22nd at Budds Creek on 19-36 scores. Key Question 1, "does Hunter Lawrence respond?": yes, emphatically. He won both motos, retook the points lead by one, and was champion by two a week later.
There is no Round 9 scorecard because no Round 9 preview was published. This page had been carrying the archived Round 2 (Hangtown) editorial since June 6, seven rounds during which the Saturday update did not run to completion. Grading ourselves against predictions we never made would be worse than admitting the gap, so: no picks, no hit rate, no credit.
These are editorial calls, not statistical forecasts. Inputs are the
completed 2026 Supercross and Pro Motocross seasons (from
promotocross.com and supercrosslive.com, reconciled against the official
points tables), the two contested playoff rounds (racerxonline.com
classifications, reconciled against the official supermotocross.com
standings) and the SMX seeding and multiplier rules in
data/series.js.
The live model at the top of this page is the statistical view and is
generated separately; where the two disagree, they disagree in public.
Every prediction on this page gets graded in the scorecard section above after the round runs: how many of the predicted top five actually finished top five, whether the holeshot pick hit, and whether the sleeper improved on their previous round.