Josh Berry’s 2025 playoff weekend began with a lot of promise. His March victory at Las Vegas in the No. 21 Wood Brothers Ford had already locked him into the playoff field and his steady season made him feel like a fringe contender going into the Round of 16.
Instead the Round of 16 became a nightmare: a first-lap crash at Darlington knocked him to the back in race one, effectively putting him on the defensive from the jump.
A week later at World Wide Technology Raceway, contact with Chase Elliott sent Berry hard into the wall and cut his Gateway night far shorter than he, or the Wood Brothers, had hoped.
Then Bristol delivered the coup de grâce: an early fire from the No. 21 forced an early exit and left Berry scored dead last in the third race of the opening round.
The triple set of last-place finishes—Darlington, Gateway and Bristol—dropped Berry to the bottom of the Round of 16 standings and ended what had been a quietly encouraging season for a small but resurgent Wood Brothers program.
Since NASCAR implemented the elimination-style playoffs in 2014 the format has produced wild results, but no driver has had a playoff performance historically this bad.
Statistically, Berry’s Round of 16 produced an average finish that is roughly nearing 37th—the worst three-race opening-round showing in the playoff era.
That said, declaring a single, indisputable “worst playoff performance ever” is tricky. Analytically, drivers typically measure bad rounds by average finish, points scored or DNFs, and different eras of the postseason have different rule tweaks, including how points are awarded, making direct apples-to-apples comparisons impossible.
Looking back at other notably poor playoff rounds since 2014, many point to a handful of low-scoring or DNF-heavy results, drivers who collected single-digit points or multiple DNFs in a round. But none of those historical examples match Berry’s combination of three straight last-place finishes in a single opening round.
For Josh Berry, the results are harsh. A season that had a bona fide highlight, the Las Vegas win that punched his postseason ticket, ended almost as quickly as the playoff started. It’s a reminder of how unforgiving a three-race elimination round could be for smaller teams and first-time winners.
In short, while the playoff era has seen plenty of statistically ugly postseason runs, Berry’s three last-place finishes in the 2025 Round of 16 stand out in the record books and is the very worst single-round performance since 2014.
Whether that ends up as an official, irrefutable “record” may depend on how future statisticians choose to count comparable metrics, but how can it get much worse than three straight last place finishes?
Berry and the Wood Brothers will head into the offseason with an odd mix of optimism and a hard lesson learned, that in the win-and-in era, one bad round, or three bad races in a row, can erase a year’s worth in a single moment.
