A college football futures price quoted in cents is a probability in disguise: a 15c contract on Ohio State implies roughly a 15% chance of a national title. The catch is that the raw cent price is gross of vig, so it overstates true odds. Reading it correctly means stripping that margin out to reach fair value, which is exactly what Ohio State's de-vigged 15% delivers.
The gap between the cents on the screen and the de-vigged fair value is small at the top of the board and wide at the bottom. That is the single most useful thing to understand before treating any price as a probability.
What does a 16c price actually mean?
Start with the mechanical read. A contract that settles at $1 if the outcome hits trades at a price between 0c and 100c, and that price is the market's implied probability. Georgia's best price of 16c on Polymarket is the market saying, in the crudest terms, about 16%.
That first number is a starting point, not the answer. Every quote carries a margin, so the implied figure sits slightly above the real probability. The model's fair value for Georgia is 15.5%, meaning roughly half a point of the 16c quote is vig rather than true edge.
The cleaner the market and the heavier the favorite, the smaller that gap. Ohio State's 15c maps to a 15% fair value with no daylight at all, the tightest cents-to-probability line in the field.
Why do the prices sum past 100%?
If every team's cent price were a true probability, the field would sum to exactly 100%. It does not. Each price bakes in a margin, so adding the raw quotes across all teams overshoots. The consensus fair value corrects this by rescaling the entire field back toward 100%, which is what de-vigging means in practice.
The chart below shows the de-vigged fair values at the top of the title board. These are the numbers to treat as probabilities, not the cent prices next to them on any single venue.
Do longshots carry more vig than favorites?
Yes, and it is the trap in reading cent prices literally. The margin is not spread evenly. Near the top, Georgia's 16c against a 15.5% fair value is about a 3% premium, and Miami's 15c against 14.8% is thinner still. Those are rounding-error gaps.
Down the board the premium balloons in relative terms. Ole Miss trades at 5c against a 3.4% fair value, a 1.6-point gap that represents close to a 47% markup on the true probability. Indiana's 8c against 7.4% is milder but still wider than any favorite's.
The lesson: a longshot cent price flatters the real chance far more than a favorite's does. Converting 5c straight to 5% would overstate Ole Miss by nearly half.
Where does best price still sit under fair value?
De-vigging also flags the inverse case: a cent price that undercuts fair value. Alabama's best price is 4c against a 4.2% fair value, so the cheapest venue is quoting below the consensus probability rather than above it. That is the shape of a price the model reads as cheap rather than rich.
Isolating that requires the two inputs the site already surfaces: the de-vigged fair value and the cheapest venue quote. Ohio State's 15c best sits on Kalshi, while Georgia's 16c and Miami's 15c sit on Polymarket, so the venue that de-vigs most favorably varies team by team. Traders comparing venues can weigh promos such as Kalshi's FADE or Polymarket's TGSWC, though the fair-value read comes first.
The workflow is the same every time: read the cents, strip the vig to fair value, then check whether the best available price sits above or below that number.
What the probabilities cannot tell you
De-vigged fair value is a cleaner probability than a raw cent price, but it is still an estimate. Both the market and the model can be wrong, and a single season of college football is a small sample against which to grade any 15% or 3% read.
Fair value also moves. Injuries, results and liquidity shifts reprice the board, and the figures here are a snapshot as of October 18, 2026. The method survives the churn even when the numbers do not: convert cents to a probability, remove the vig, and compare the result to the cheapest price on offer. This is analysis of market pricing, not financial advice.
