A college football futures price in cents is the market's shorthand for probability: a contract trading at 15c implies roughly a 15% chance, because it settles at 100c if the outcome happens and 0c if it does not. Georgia's 15c best price to win the national title maps almost exactly to the model's 15.7% fair value. The catch is that raw prices run slightly rich, so the number on screen is a starting point, not the finished probability.
What does a 15c futures price actually mean?
On these exchanges, each contract pays out 100c if it wins and nothing if it loses. That makes the price a direct read on implied probability: divide the cent price by 100 and the result is the market's estimate. A 13c quote on Ohio State reads as about 13%; the model's fair value sits at 12.7%, within a point.
The reason the two numbers differ is margin. The quoted price bakes in a small cushion, so the implied probability it shows is always a touch higher than the true, de-vigged figure. Reading prices well means treating the cent quote as the market's gross estimate and the fair value as the net one.
Why does the title board add up to more than 100%?
Add the cheapest available price for every contender and the total clears 100c well before the full field is counted. Across the 12 priced teams here, best prices sum to 92c, and that leaves out every unlisted program that still carries live title equity. In a clean probability world the whole field would sum to exactly 100.
The excess is the overround, the market's built-in edge. To turn the board into honest probabilities, the model sums the implied odds across all outcomes and scales each down proportionally until the total returns to 100%. After that rescaling, the same 12 teams sum to 86.2% in fair value, leaving roughly 13.8% spread across the rest of the field.
Best price versus fair value: how to read the gap
Fair value is the de-vigged consensus probability the model builds from prices across Polymarket and Kalshi. Best price is a separate idea: the single cheapest quote for a team across those venues. Because each best price is pulled from whichever book is lowest, the best-price column is not a coherent book and should not be summed as one.
The practical read is the spacing between the two. When a team's cheapest tradable price sits at or below its fair value, the contract is reasonably priced to generous. When the cheapest price sits above fair value, the market is charging a premium. Georgia at 15c against 15.7% fair value is close; a longshot at 1c against 1.1% fair value is also close, which is why a small number alone does not signal value.
Reading the current board
At the top, Georgia prices richest at 15.7% fair value with a 15c best price on Polymarket, and Miami sits just behind at 14% fair value, also 15c on Polymarket. Ohio State and Notre Dame are level at 12.7% fair value, each cheapest at 13c on Kalshi, a tidy example of two teams the market treats as interchangeable.
The second tier shows the same cents-to-percent logic: Indiana at 7.4% fair value trades 8c on Polymarket, LSU at 6.7% trades 7c on Kalshi, and Texas at 6.3% trades 7c on Polymarket. Down in the longshots, Florida reads 1.1% fair value against a 1c best price on Polymarket, about as tight as the board gets.
Reading a futures board, then, is three moves: convert cents to a rough percentage, remember the board is inflated by the overround, and compare the cheapest tradable price to de-vigged fair value rather than to the raw quote. Traders new to the venues can explore them with promo codes such as Polymarket TGSWC or Kalshi FADE, though prices and the model can both be wrong and none of this is financial advice.
