Seventeen non-quarterbacks trade on Kalshi's NFL MVP board. Sixteen of them have no bid at all.
You can buy Bijan Robinson, Christian McCaffrey or Ja'Marr Chase for a penny each. Nobody has posted a price they would buy those tickets back at. Only Jahmyr Gibbs, at two cents, has a market with both sides quoted. That is not a market pricing a running back's chances so much as a market declining to quote one.
The reason is a streak. The NFL MVP has gone to a quarterback 13 seasons running, and the last player to break the pattern was Adrian Peterson in 2012. That is the single most useful fact for anyone looking at a back or a receiver on an MVP board and wondering whether the price is generous or just wrong. A streak that long is not a coincidence, but it is also not permanent.
The streak, in one table
| Season | Winner | Position |
|---|---|---|
| 2025 | Matthew Stafford | QB |
| 2024 | Josh Allen | QB |
| 2023 | Lamar Jackson | QB |
| 2022 | Patrick Mahomes | QB |
| 2021 | Aaron Rodgers | QB |
| 2020 | Aaron Rodgers | QB |
| 2019 | Lamar Jackson | QB |
| 2018 | Patrick Mahomes | QB |
| 2017 | Tom Brady | QB |
| 2016 | Matt Ryan | QB |
| 2015 | Cam Newton | QB |
| 2014 | Aaron Rodgers | QB |
| 2013 | Peyton Manning | QB |
| 2012 | Adrian Peterson | RB |
Associated Press NFL MVP winners, the award Kalshi's regular-season MVP market settles on.
Widen the window and the picture is less one-sided, but not by much. From 1990 through 2025, running backs won seven of 36 awards: Thurman Thomas in 1991, Emmitt Smith in 1993, Terrell Davis in 1998, Marshall Faulk in 2000, Shaun Alexander in 2005, LaDainian Tomlinson in 2006 and Peterson in 2012. That is roughly one season in five across the whole period, and none at all in the last 13.
Two anchors, then, for anyone pricing a non-quarterback: about 19 percent if you believe the long run still applies, and zero if you believe the game changed around 2012. The honest answer sits between them, and the argument over where is the entire bet.
Everyone else has to go back further
The award has gone to exactly one wide receiver, Jerry Rice in 1987. It has gone to one kicker, Mark Moseley in 1982, still the only special-teams player to win it. Defensive players have won it twice: Alan Page in 1971 and Lawrence Taylor in 1986. No defender has won since, a 39-season drought and counting.
Put plainly: if you are looking at anyone on an MVP board who is not a quarterback or a running back, you are betting on something that has happened four times since the Eisenhower administration.
Why quarterbacks took the award
The votes follow the position that touches the ball on every snap and owns the statistics that keep growing. This is my read of the pattern rather than anything the voters publish, and three things drive it.
Passing volume climbed while the workhorse back disappeared. The backs who won carried a season: Peterson ran for 2,097 yards in 2012, a total no back has approached since, and the winners at the position all delivered a number that stood out league-wide, not a good season on a good team. Committee backfields make that kind of number rarer every year.
The quarterback's stat line also travels with team success in a way nobody else's does. Voters reward the best player on a team near the top of the standings, and the quarterback is the default answer to that question on almost every contender.
And the ballot rewards a season-long story. A back who misses three games loses the narrative; a quarterback who plays 17 and throws for 40 touchdowns carries it into December on his own.
What a non-quarterback needs
The seven modern running-back winners share a template worth holding any longshot against.
A historic statistical season, not merely a great one. Peterson's 2,097 yards, Faulk's 2,429 total yards in 2000, Alexander's 27 touchdowns in 2005. Each led the league by a distance, and each produced a number a casual fan could repeat from memory.
A winning team. Every one of the seven played for a club in the playoff race, most of them for division winners. The award has never gone to a great player on a bad team at this position.
A quarterback field with no consensus. Peterson won the year Peyton Manning's comeback and Tom Brady's season split the quarterback vote. When one passer runs away with the statistical race, the debate never opens.
Check any non-quarterback price against those three. If a back is on pace for a merely excellent season, or his team is 7-7, or a quarterback is having a historic year of his own, the ticket is dead well before the voting.
What the market actually pays
Kalshi's regular-season market, ticker KXNFLMVP-27, lists 47 names, and 17 of them are not quarterbacks. Because each name trades as its own yes-or-no contract, you can add the non-quarterbacks up and read the market's own answer to the question in the headline.
Together they total 18 cents. That lands almost exactly on the long-run rate of 19 percent, as though the last 13 seasons had not happened. The whole board's last trades sum to 126 cents, so scaling that 18 down for the overround puts the honest number nearer 14 percent.
| Non-QB candidate | Position | Cost to buy | Best bid | Contracts traded |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Jahmyr Gibbs | RB | 2¢ | 1¢ | 1,124,486 |
| Bijan Robinson | RB | 1¢ | none | 122,402 |
| Jaxon Smith-Njigba | WR | 1¢ | none | 121,699 |
| Kenneth Walker III | RB | 1¢ | none | 73,004 |
| Myles Garrett | EDGE | 1¢ | none | 70,910 |
| Christian McCaffrey | RB | 1¢ | none | 54,102 |
| Saquon Barkley | RB | 1¢ | none | 46,756 |
| Jonathan Taylor | RB | 1¢ | none | 27,358 |
The eight most-traded non-quarterbacks on Kalshi's KXNFLMVP-27 board, read at 4:08 p.m. ET on Thursday, Sept. 17, 2026. Nine more sit at a penny behind them, including Ja'Marr Chase, Justin Jefferson, Derrick Henry and Micah Parsons.
The bid column is the one that matters. That 18-cent total is what it would cost to buy the whole block, not what anyone would pay you for it. A penny on a back who breaks the league open is a lottery ticket priced like a lottery ticket, and the only one of them you could sell in December is the back the board already likes.
For today's prices on the whole board, including the quarterbacks at the top of it, our NFL MVP odds page tracks the market week to week. If contracts priced in cents are new to you, here is how Kalshi's yes-or-no markets work.
About the numbers
Winners and positions are Associated Press MVP results, the award Kalshi's regular-season market settles on. A price in cents reads as a chance, so a 4-cent contract is roughly a 4 percent chance, and because every player trades separately, the listed prices across the board add to more than 100. Nothing here is financial advice.
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Hero illustration: OddsShopper, in the house collage style. Adrian Peterson photo by Joe Bielawa, licensed CC BY 2.0; photo cropped, toned, and composited.
