2027 College Football National Championship

Kalshi lists the 2026 college football season as five nested books—make the Playoff, reach the quarterfinal, reach the semifinal, reach the final, win it—and together they turn over about $3.15 million a day, second in the catalog only to this week's PGA Tour event. Two weeks out from kickoff, they are the deepest futures market on the exchange.

Nested books priced independently give you something rare: a full round-by-round survival curve for every team, and a way to check the market against itself. Notre Dame prices 84% to make the Playoff, 72% to reach the quarterfinal, 42.5% the semifinal, 25.5% the final and 12.5% to win. Ohio State runs 75% / 60% / 40% / 27% / 12.5%. Two very different paths, the same championship price.

The curves also expose two contracts that cannot both be right—see the section below.

The survival ladder. These three Multiples price each team to reach a specific round, so they do not sum to 100% and they can be read as a conditional chain. Divide any team's championship price by its finalist price and you get the market's implied probability that it wins a final it reaches:

• Texas and Georgia: 50%—the market treats them as neutral in a title game.
• Notre Dame: 49%. Ohio State: 46%.
• Miami: 37%. Indiana: 40%. Both are priced as teams that get there and lose.
• Penn State: 8%. See the next section.

Read across instead of down and a different story appears: Miami is 75.5% to make the Playoff and 66% to reach the quarterfinal—better than Ohio State on both—but 7.5% to win it against Ohio State's 12.5%. The market rates Miami's regular season and doubts its January.

Two teams are priced to reach a final they cannot reach.

Texas Tech prices 14.5% to reach the semifinal and 15% to reach the final. Penn State prices 16.5% to reach the semifinal and 18% to reach the final. In a bracket, reaching the final requires winning the semifinal, so the finalist number can never exceed the semifinal number. Both books have it backwards.

These are not big spreads—half a point and a point and a half—but they are free money in an arbitrage-free sense, and they have survived on books turning over hundreds of thousands of dollars a day. The likely explanation is that the flow concentrates on a handful of legs (Oregon's semifinal leg carries $216; most carry nothing) and the untraded legs drift on market-maker quotes that are never checked against the sibling book. Volume in a Multiple does not mean every leg is priced.

The Heisman book, and the clearest case in the workspace of money running against odds. CJ Carr leads at 12.5% on $4,532. Dante Moore prices 5.5% and carries $18,298—four times the favorite's volume at less than half the probability. Trinidad Chambliss at 6.5% carries $12,366 and Darian Mensah at 7.5% carries $8,476.

The three deepest legs on the Heisman book are all priced under 8%. That is the same inverted probability-volume relationship visible in the outright championship book above, and in the oil, Ethereum and leadership books elsewhere in the catalog. It appears to be a structural feature of how retail flow arrives at long-dated futures rather than a quirk of any one sport.

The national championship Categorical alongside the finalist Multiple. The outright book is genuinely open: Ohio State and Notre Dame share the lead at 12.5%, then Texas at 11.5%, Oregon 10.5%, Georgia 9.5%, Indiana 8.5% and Miami 7.5%. Seven teams inside five points with no games played.

Note the volume distribution on the outright: Oregon at 10.5% carries $15,029 and Texas at 11.5% carries $12,421, while co-favorite Notre Dame carries $3,561. The money is not on the names at the top of the board.

The two deepest conference title races—the SEC and the Big Ten—which settle in early December and are the first real information any of the books above will get. Until then the outright pie is preseason ranking, recruiting and whoever shows up to trade it. The Big 12 and ACC races are one search away in the panel at the bottom.

• Five nested books, $3.15M a day, two weeks before kickoff. The deepest futures complex on the exchange, and it is college football rather than the NFL.
• Same price, different path. Notre Dame and Ohio State both price 12.5% to win from survival curves that differ by nine points at the Playoff stage and thirty at the quarterfinal.
• Two arbitrage violations are live right now. Texas Tech (14.5% semifinal, 15% final) and Penn State (16.5% semifinal, 18% final) both price a final they cannot reach. Neither has closed.
• Miami is the market's regular-season team. Top-three odds to make the Playoff and reach the quarterfinal; seventh on the outright. Implied 37% to win a final it reaches, the lowest of the contenders.
• Texas and Georgia are the market's January teams. Both implied at exactly 50% to win a title game—the market has no read on them either way once they arrive.
• Volume runs backwards on both the outright and the Heisman. Oregon and Texas outrank the co-favorites on flow; the three deepest Heisman legs all price under 8%.
• What to watch: whether the semifinal-versus-finalist violations close once the season starts and real flow arrives, and the conference title races in December, which are the first genuine information any of these books will get.