The playoff cut line battle continues to evolve, 16 races into the 26-race regular season.
Week after week, RFK Racing had been able to boast about being the only team to have all of their cars finish every race and run every lap during the 2026 NASCAR Cup Series season, and all three of their cars were also in the provisional 16-driver playoff field for much of that stretch.
But that position always felt a bit fragile, because as fans know, there's a major difference between being consistent, and being consistently good.
As we've seen with Ryan Preece's recent plummet outside the top 16 in the point standings, the driver of the No. 60 Ford was merely consistent, because once adversity struck, his position in the playoff picture was simply not sustainable by racking up top 18 finishes.
Now something similar has happened to Brad Keselowski.
Brad Keselowski out of the NASCAR playoff picture
The 2012 Cup champion has been in the provisional playoff picture all year, but that is no longer the case following Sunday's race at Pocono Raceway.
In the season's first 13 races, he finished outside of the top 20 just twice. But only four times did he finish in the top 10, and only two times did he finish in the top five. Now he's riding a streak of three consecutive DNFs, and as a result, he too has dropped out of the top 16.
Legacy Motor Club's Erik Jones, who has quietly been heating up as of late following another lackluster start to the season, replaced Keselowski in the provisional playoff picture following his sixth place finish on Sunday. Jones finished second at Michigan International Speedway just one week prior.
Jones and Team Penske's Austin Cindric are tied for 15th in the point standings, although Jones owns the tiebreaker since his season-high finish (second) is better than Cindric's (fifth). So the current cutoff sits between Cindric and the driver he replaced in the No. 2 Ford four years ago.
Keselowski is four points below the cut line. His own top finish of the year is second place at Darlington Raceway. His second-best finish of fifth in the season-opening Daytona 500 at Daytona International Speedway would give him the advantage over Jones in a tiebreaker scenario, but that could very well change over the course of the regular season's final 10 races.
Sitting 17 points below Keselowski (21 points below the cutoff) is Team Penske's Joey Logano, a driver many pegged to struggle under the new postseason format following the removal of "win and in" and the knockout playoff structure. This year, the playoffs are simply set to consist of the 16 drivers in the top 16 of the regular season standings.
Preece is 12 points behind Logano, and notably even if he had not been docked 25 points for his contact with Joe Gibbs Racing's Ty Gibbs at Texas Motor Speedway, he'd still be eight points below the cutoff. He'd just be in 18th place, rather than 19th.
Race number 17 on the 2026 NASCAR Cup Series regular season schedule is the Anduril 250, which is set to be shown live on Amazon Prime Video from Qualcomm Circuit, more commonly known as the Coronado Street Course, on Naval Base Coronado in San Diego, California. Don't miss any of the action from NASCAR's newest event at 4:00 p.m. ET on Sunday, June 21!
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