A college football futures price is a probability wearing a dollar sign. A contract quoted at 13c is the market saying the outcome is worth about 13 cents on a one-dollar payout, which reads directly as a roughly 13 percent chance. To move from that raw price to a defensible fair value, strip out the vig and compare against the model. Ohio State's 13c best price on Kalshi becomes a 10.9 percent fair value once the field is de-vigged.
How do you turn a futures price into a probability?
The arithmetic is direct: cents equal implied percent. A contract settles at 100c if the outcome hits and 0c if it does not, so the current price is the market's estimate of that chance. Notre Dame at 13c on Kalshi implies about 13 percent; Oregon at 11c implies about 11 percent; Miami at 8c implies about 8 percent.
That raw read is the starting point, not the answer. It carries the venue's margin and reflects only the best visible price, so treat it as the market's gross estimate before any cleanup.
Why do the prices add up to more than 100 percent?
Add the raw implied probabilities of every team and the total clears 100 percent. That excess is the overround, the margin embedded in each quote. It is the reason a sticker price always overstates the true chance to some degree.
De-vigging removes it. The full field of prices is rescaled so the probabilities sum back toward 100 percent, which produces the consensus fair value. The gap between a team's raw price and its de-vigged fair value is the vig it is carrying: Texas reads 12c raw but 10 percent fair, and Georgia reads 10c raw but 8.6 percent fair.
Where does price sit relative to fair value?
Once fair value is in hand, the useful question is whether the cheapest available price sits above or below it. For most of the board the best price sits above fair value, the expected floor created by the margin. Indiana at 9c against an 8.3 percent fair value and Oregon at 11c against 9.7 percent both fit that pattern.
The exceptions are where attention belongs. Miami's 8c best price on Kalshi sits below its 9 percent model fair value, and Alabama's 2c on Polymarket sits below its 2.3 percent fair value. Those are the cases where the cheapest venue is printing a probability under the model's estimate rather than above it.
Which venue prints the cheapest probability?
The best price is the lowest number across venues, because a lower price is a cheaper way to buy the same probability. On the listed national-title favorites, Kalshi holds every cheapest quote, from Ohio State and Notre Dame at 13c down to Georgia at 10c and Miami at 8c.
Polymarket owns the tail. LSU's best price is 6c there, with Texas Tech, Texas A&M and Oklahoma at 3c and Alabama at 2c. Traders comparing the two venues can note the split cleanly: Kalshi for the top of the board, Polymarket for the longshots. Promo codes exist at each venue (Kalshi FADE, Polymarket TGSWC), but they do not change the underlying prices.
None of this is financial advice, and prices and the model can both be wrong. The point is method: convert cents to a probability, de-vig the field to fair value, then judge the cheapest price against that number.
