To read a college football futures price as a probability, take the price in cents on a contract that settles at 100 cents and treat it as the raw implied chance: Oregon at 11c reads as about an 11 percent title probability. The model's de-vigged fair value refines that number to 11.7 percent, the top of the current board.
How does a cent price become an implied probability?
Prediction-market futures resolve to a fixed payout: a winning national title contract settles at 100 cents, a losing one at zero. That fixed settlement is what makes the price legible. A contract trading at 13c will return 100 cents if it hits, so the market is quoting roughly a 13 percent chance of that outcome.
This is the first move in reading any board. Ohio State at 13c on Kalshi and Notre Dame at 13c on Polymarket both quote about 13 percent in raw terms. The cents are not arbitrary; they are the market's live probability estimate, updated as contracts trade.
The raw read is only a starting point. Quoted prices carry a built-in margin, so the naive percentages need one adjustment before they can be compared cleanly.
Why do the probabilities add up to more than 100 percent?
Sum every raw price across a title market and the total lands above 100 percent. That surplus is the overround, the market's version of the vig. It exists because each contract is priced with a cushion, so the field of outcomes appears to carry more than a full unit of probability.
De-vigging removes that cushion. The process scales the raw implied probabilities down proportionally until they total 100 percent, which converts a set of padded quotes into a coherent fair value. The model does this across Kalshi and Polymarket to build a single consensus number per team.
The result is the fair value column: Oregon 11.7 percent, Ohio State 11.1 percent, Notre Dame 10.9 percent, Texas 9.5 percent, Indiana 8.7 percent, Georgia 8.4 percent. These are the figures to trust over the raw cents, because they account for the margin baked into every quote.
What does the fair-value board look like now?
The top of the market is tightly bunched. Four teams sit within about two points of each other at the top, and the drop from favorite to eighth is gradual rather than steep. That compression is the market's way of saying the title picture is genuinely open.
Below the top tier, the board thins out. Miami holds 7.7 percent, LSU 4.9 percent, and the field falls into low single digits from Texas Tech and Alabama down through Texas A&M and Ole Miss.
Where does best price diverge from fair value?
The gap between the cheapest available quote and the model's fair value is where a price read earns its keep. When best price sits below fair value, the contract is offering entry under the model's probability estimate.
Indiana is the clearest example: it trades 10c on Kalshi against an 8.7 percent fair value, so here the price sits above the model rather than below it. By contrast, Oregon at 11c on Kalshi trades under its 11.7 percent fair value, and Ohio State at 13c reads rich against 11.1 percent. Reading both columns together, not the cents alone, is the discipline.
Venue matters to that read. Kalshi holds the best price on several favorites, while Polymarket carries the cheapest quotes on Notre Dame, Texas, Georgia and LSU. Traders comparing entry points can note the venue codes as they scan: Kalshi FADE and Polymarket TGSWC.
How should a reader use these numbers?
The workflow is short. Convert the cents to a raw probability, remember that the raw figures overstate because of the vig, then lean on the de-vigged fair value as the cleaner estimate. Finally, compare that fair value to the best price on offer to see whether a contract is cheap, fair or rich.
Prices and models can both be wrong, and a fair value is an estimate, not a settlement. The board will move as results and news arrive. What the framework provides is a consistent way to translate a wall of cents into probabilities, which is the first step in judging whether any price is worth the contract.
