Updated September 8, 2026 · prices as of September 8, 2026, 2:57 p.m. Eastern · by Jake Hari
The Quick Answer
Tua Tagovailoa starts for the Atlanta Falcons in Week 1 at Pittsburgh on Sunday, September 13. The team said so on Monday morning, September 7. Kalshi's market on the Falcons' Week 1 starting quarterback went from 78¢ to 99¢ in eleven seconds, and as of 2:57 p.m. Eastern on Tuesday, September 8, it is still 99¢ bid with nothing offered below a dollar. Michael Penix Jr. quotes 0/1 and will be inactive on Sunday as he works back from last November's ACL surgery; Cooper Rush was named the backup for Week 1.
The question underneath the settled board is when Penix actually takes the job, and the answer is that no market prices it. Kalshi lists no Week 2 starting-quarterback contract for Atlanta and nothing on Penix's return; past Sunday, its only Falcons contract is the Week 2 game against Carolina. What the exchange does show is where the money went once the quarterback question closed: this board's last 24 hours came to about 3,400 contracts, every Tagovailoa print a holder selling the last cent, while Kalshi's "Pittsburgh wins by over 3.5 points" contract turned over almost 34,000 in the same 24 hours. The day-after tape, the full board against Monday's prices, the record on Penix's timeline, and the sportsbook screen on the game are below.
Eleven Seconds
The Falcons' announcement, per the Associated Press, came from head coach Kevin Stefanski on Monday: Tagovailoa starts, Rush backs him up, Penix is inactive. "Of course, Mike just getting back to 11-on-11, wanted to make sure we gave him an opportunity in these practices, and we did," Stefanski said. "But feel strongly about our decision with everything, all the information available to us." Penix was cleared for full-team work on August 22 and never took a preseason snap.
The board's first reaction printed at 8:10:27 a.m. Eastern, seven small buys of Tagovailoa at 78¢ and 79¢. Two seconds later a 344-contract buy printed at 95¢. By 8:10:35 the contract was at 99¢, and a 782-contract buy at 99¢ at 8:10:38 was the last real step. The whole move, 78¢ to 99¢, took eleven seconds. The 8 a.m. hour on Monday finished with 12,102 contracts traded, and 11,121 of them were bought. The largest buy of the day came at 8:21:25, a 6,847-contract buy at 99¢ from someone paying the full price for the last cent. Everything since has been the other side of that trade: sellers of Tagovailoa at 99¢, a few of them new positions betting a penny that the announcement is wrong and, as the open-interest numbers below show, most of them existing holders taking 99¢ now rather than waiting for the dollar.
Penix's rung went the other way in the same window. It printed at 24¢ at 8:10:29, 20¢ seven seconds later, then 15¢, 4¢ and back to 7¢ inside the same second at 8:10:38, before a 1,685-contract sale at 3¢ at 8:10:45 took it to the floor. It printed 1¢ at 8:12:31 and has traded at a cent or two since. Recall the 12,009-contract sale at 38¢ that hit this rung on Wednesday night, September 2, the largest print in the market's life: that seller is 37 cents to the good on paper and collects the rest when the exchange settles.
Before the announcement, the price history shows one strange print and otherwise a market waiting. Tagovailoa closed Friday at 69¢, then walked to 77¢ on Saturday and closed Sunday at 76¢, on no headline I can attach to it. Penix closed the same three sessions at 31¢, 27¢ and 25¢, and was still 26¢ as late as 6:32 a.m. Monday. The strange print came at 3:14:55 a.m. Eastern: a single sweep of about 2,300 contracts, just under five hours before the news, that lifted every resting Tagovailoa offer from 73¢ up through 95¢ in one second. Thirty-five minutes later the book had refilled and the contract printed 72¢ and 73¢ again, and it was 78¢ when the news hit. I cannot tell you whether that 3 a.m. buyer knew something or fat-fingered a market order into a thin overnight book; I can tell you the crowd did not follow it, and that the market still had 21 cents to do at 8:10, and did them at once.
The number to hold onto21 cents in eleven seconds. The market spent a week walking Tagovailoa from a coin flip on August 29 to 76¢ on Sunday night and still needed the announcement for the rest. One pre-dawn sweep to 95¢ that the book refilled within the hour is the only thing on the price history that looks like a leak, and the crowd treated it as noise.
The Day After
A board that has answered its question does one of two things: it goes quiet, or its holders spend a day handing the position to someone who wants to wait for settlement. Monday did the second; Tuesday did the first.
Monday finished with 37,741 Tagovailoa contracts traded, and only 13,443 of them were buys. The rest were holders selling at 99¢ into whoever wanted a dollar-for-99-cents wait, and the largest print of the whole day belongs to that side: 8,347 contracts sold at 99¢ at 10:50:32 a.m., bigger than the 6,847-contract buy at 8:21 that the morning is remembered for. From the 12:20 p.m. read this page last printed through 11:01 p.m., there were 23 more prints, 4,250 contracts, every one of them a sale at 99¢. The Penix rung did its own version: 8,747 contracts on the day, and after 12:20 p.m. a further 3,687 at a cent and two cents, the largest a 1,986-contract print at 1¢ at 1:17 p.m., where the aggressor paid 99¢ for the NO side to collect a dollar next week and a YES holder let a dead ticket go for a penny.
Tuesday, through 2:20 p.m., the Tagovailoa rung printed eleven times for 990 contracts. All eleven were sales at 99¢; nobody bought. The Penix rung printed ten times for 105 contracts, between a cent and 8¢. Across the five names the board's 24-hour volume at the 2:57 p.m. read was about 3,400 contracts, against 32,798 on the Tagovailoa rung alone at Monday's 12:20 p.m. read. The quarterback question, as a thing people trade, lasted one business day past the answer.
Here is the promise I will pay off at the bottom: since Monday's announcement, one print has paid a higher price than anyone has paid for any name but Tagovailoa's, and it landed on the rung this page called bait yesterday.
The money did not leave the exchange; it moved down the page. Kalshi's Atlanta-at-Pittsburgh spread contract, "Pittsburgh wins by over 3.5 points," turned over 33,851 contracts in the 24 hours to 2:57 p.m. Tuesday, ten times this board's total, and it did it without moving, 48¢ bid, 49¢ ask, the same quote as Monday. The Steelers winner contract traded 12,362 in the same window at 62/63, a cent under Monday's 64¢ close and inside the two-cent band it has held since Friday. Told who the quarterback is, the market went to work on the number the quarterback affects, and found nothing new to say about it.
The Market
| Venue | Kalshi |
| The Event | "Who will start at quarterback for Atlanta in Week 1?" sold as mutually exclusive yes/no contracts, one per candidate |
| What Pays | Kalshi's rules, verbatim: "Position designation is determined by the official depth chart published by the team for the specified week. If no official depth chart is available, the designation comes from official team communications (injury reports, press releases). … If the player is injured but still officially listed at the position, the market resolves to Yes." |
| Early Close | Kalshi's listed condition, verbatim: "This market will close and expire early if the official depth chart is released." As of Tuesday afternoon the market is still open, with a scheduled close of September 14 at 11:59 p.m. Eastern |
| Prices Below As Of | 2:57 p.m. Eastern, Tuesday, September 8, 2026 |
A cent is a percent, and our guide to how to bet NFL on Kalshi covers the rest.
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The Falcons Week 1 Starting QB Board: Priced At 99
The full board, read at 2:57 p.m. Eastern on Tuesday, September 8, with the move since this page last printed it at 12:20 p.m. on Monday, September 7. Volume and open interest are in dollars of contract face value, one dollar per contract, the way the exchange displays them.
| Contract (Week 1 Starting QB) | Last | Bid / Ask | Volume (Face Value) | Open Interest (Face Value) | Move since Sep 7 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Tua Tagovailoa | 99¢ | 99 / none offered below a dollar | 130,031 | 60,806 | 99 bid → 99 bid (volume +5,239; open interest +28) |
| Michael Penix Jr. | 1¢ | 0 / 1 | 90,835 | 55,907 | 0/1 → 0/1 (volume +3,793; open interest +52) |
| Jack Strand | 1¢ | 0 / 1 | 22,142 | 17,232 | 0/1 → 0/1 (open interest +267) |
| Cooper Rush | 41¢ | 0 / 35 | 3,603 | 2,930 | 0/41 → 0/35 (ask −6) |
| Trevor Siemian | 14¢ | 0 / 14 | 362 | 356 | 0/14 → 0/14 (last 5¢ → 14¢ on six contracts) |
The Tagovailoa row tells the day-after story in two numbers: volume up 5,239 contracts since Monday noon, open interest up 28. Almost every contract that traded was an existing holder handing the position to a new one; the market is not getting bigger, it is changing hands. The 24-hour volume on the rung was 2,893 at the read, down from 32,798.
The row I keep pointing readers at is still Penix's open interest. It rose from 55,855 on Monday to 55,907 on Tuesday, on a contract that has closed 0/1 on every read since Monday morning, with 3,687 contracts on Monday afternoon and ten small prints on Tuesday in between, all of it between a cent and 8¢. Nearly 56,000 contracts of face value stay open on a name the team has ruled out for Sunday, because most NO holders do not need to sell a 1¢ contract to collect. They wait for the official depth chart to close the market, and the rung will carry that open interest until it does.
The tail is a footnote with two changes. Cooper Rush's ask came down from 41¢ to 35¢, still against no bid, and the 41¢ "last" printed in the table is a real trade from Monday evening, which the last section gets to. Trevor Siemian, whose name is on Kalshi's board and nowhere in the Falcons' announcement, printed 14¢ on six contracts at 11:46 a.m. Tuesday, somebody lifting the only offer on the board's cheapest name; his last had been 5¢. Jack Strand still has 17,232 contracts of open interest at 1¢.
When Does Penix Take The Job?
This is the question the board leaves behind, and I want to be precise about what the market says on it, because the answer is nothing, yet.
The closest thing to a priced opinion on Penix's readiness that has ever existed is the print recalled above: 12,009 contracts of Penix sold at 38¢ on the night of Wednesday, September 2, five days before the announcement, the largest trade in the market's life. That seller was not pricing Penix's career; the contract only asks about Week 1. But 12,009 contracts changed hands at 38¢, about $4,600 at that price, with the aggressor on the side that said the knee would not be ready for Pittsburgh, at a moment when the board still called it a 38 percent proposition, and Monday paid that side. It is the one time the market has expressed a view on Penix's timeline in size, and it was a view on one week.
Kalshi's starting-quarterback series is a Week 1 series. As of Tuesday afternoon the exchange lists no Week 2 starting-quarterback event for Atlanta, no depth-chart contract on the Falcons, and no contract of any kind on Penix's return. The only Falcons market it carries past Sunday is the Week 2 game, Carolina at Atlanta on Sunday, September 20, which quotes the Falcons at 52¢ bid, 53¢ ask, and the Panthers at 46/47, on 9,283 contracts of lifetime volume across the two rungs. That is a price on a game with whoever starts it, not a price on the quarterback, and a reader who wants a number on Penix's timeline should not read one into it.
The record, then, is the record, and it is thin by design. On September 2, NFL Network's Cameron Wolfe reported that the Falcons plan for Penix "to start eventually," and that Stefanski did not want an artificial timeline on his return. On Monday, asked whether Penix would be the starter or the backup once healthy, Stefanski told reporters, per NFL.com, "I'm gonna really stay in Week 1 right now and Pittsburgh and not speculate past that," and added, "Mike is getting better and better and better, and I'm very proud of him for how far he's come." The team's own write-up of the decision, on atlantafalcons.com, has him drawing the line the market will eventually have to price: "You can get cleared for 11-on-11 or you get cleared for a game, but then you have to be able to do your job. This will continue to be something that we work on together with Mike. We're all on the same page." Penix, in the same NFL.com report, set his own bar: "I want to be stronger. I want to be able to go out there and give the team 100%, and if I don't feel like I can do that, I don't want to."
Read those together and the shape of a future market is already visible. "Eventually" from the team's side, "when I can give 100 percent" from the player's, and a coach who will not name a week. If Kalshi lists a Week 2 or Week 3 Atlanta board, it will resolve the way this one does, on the official depth chart, and the depth chart is the one document nobody quoted above controls alone. The number I would hold it to is this. The Week 1 rung paid its biggest seller 38¢ on one week's readiness, five days out, with the player already cleared for full-team work; a "Penix starts Week 2" contract would be asking the same question about a week that begins with him inactive, from a coach who declined to answer it on Monday. Anything near that 38¢ would be pricing the September 2 trade all over again with less to go on. Below 20¢ is where I would start calling it a price rather than an ask, and the thing that moves it up is not a quote but a practice report: Penix taking first-team reps in the Wednesday, September 16 session that produces the Week 2 chart. Until then the 55,907 contracts of open interest on his Week 1 rung are the only market opinion on his timeline that exists, and they say only that the crowd is certain about Sunday. Everything after Sunday is unpriced, and this page will print the first board that prices it.
What Tua Does To The Falcons-Steelers Number
This is the part of the story that is still trading, and a second day of prices makes the Monday reading firmer: the announcement changed the certainty, not the price.
Start with the exchange. Kalshi's Atlanta-at-Pittsburgh winner market quotes the Steelers at 62¢ bid, 63¢ ask, and the Falcons at 36/37, at the 2:57 p.m. read on Tuesday. The Steelers contract opened Friday at 63¢, traded between 62¢ and 64¢ on every session since, and printed 12,362 contracts in the last 24 hours without leaving the range. The quarterback board moved 21 cents in eleven seconds on Monday; the game board, told the same news at the same moment, has spent two days inside a two-cent band. Kalshi's spread rung says the same: "Pittsburgh wins by over 3.5 points" quotes 48/49, a coin flip on the exact number the sportsbooks had already moved to, and it carried the board's heaviest trade of the day.
The sportsbooks got there first. Pittsburgh opened at -3 in May; the half-point to -3.5 came late in the preseason, before Monday's announcement, per Steelers Now, and the moneyline drifted toward Pittsburgh over the same stretch. Here is the game on both venues at the same 2:57 p.m. Eastern read on Tuesday, September 8, with the sportsbook column read from the OddsShopper live NFL odds screen at the same time.
| Falcons at Steelers, Sept 13 | Kalshi (bid / ask) | Best sportsbook price on the screen | DraftKings |
|---|---|---|---|
| Steelers to win | 62 / 63 | -175 (Bally, TheScore, Unibet and two others), about 63.6% implied | -185 |
| Falcons to win | 36 / 37 | +161 (BookMaker); +160 at Bovada, Betcris and Bet99ON | +154 |
| Steelers -3.5 (Falcons +3.5) | 48 / 49 ("wins by over 3.5") | +101 on Pittsburgh (Pinnacle); -110 on Atlanta (DraftKings, OnyxOdds) | -110 / -110 |
| Over 41.5 | 50 / 51 | 41.5 at DraftKings, Bet365, Circa and five others; 42 at 15 books; 42.5 at FanDuel, Pinnacle and five others | 41.5, over -122 |
The three is where Tuesday's screen differs from Monday's. Circa, which paid +105 on Atlanta +3 on Monday, moved to Pittsburgh -3.5 at +100 overnight; Bovada stayed at -3 and pays -105 on Atlanta +3; WynnBET and CoolBet are also posting -3 on Tuesday's screen, each paying +101 on the Falcons side. That leaves 27 sportsbooks at -3.5, three at -3, and one, Fliff, at -4.5. A bettor who wants Atlanta can have the flat three at plus money in two places or the half-point at -110 to -120 everywhere else; a bettor who wants Pittsburgh can have -3.5 at even money or better at five books, or the flat three at -119 to -125. Three is the most common final margin in the NFL, so that half-point is worth more than its price on either side, and the choice between the two prices is still the only decision on this game the announcement did not already make.
The moneyline row is the one that says the exchange and the books are reading the same game. The best sportsbook price on Pittsburgh implies about 63.6 percent with the vig still in, and Kalshi's last trade on the same outcome was 63¢; the best Falcons price implies about 38.3 percent, and Kalshi's last Falcons print was 37¢. On DraftKings, the Steelers moved from -180 to -185 between Monday's read and Tuesday's, after Sports Illustrated's betting desk counted 78 percent of moneyline bets and 58 percent of spread bets on the Steelers on Monday, and the spread still did not go past 3.5. In August, this page's Falcons-Steelers board said the one thing likely to move the number was Atlanta naming a quarterback. It moved a half-point, it moved before the naming, and two days of trade since have confirmed the number rather than tested it.
The total is where the books disagree with each other, and the disagreement did not narrow overnight. Eight books sit at 41.5, led by DraftKings with the over at -122; fifteen sit at 42; seven, FanDuel and Pinnacle among them, sit at 42.5. Sports Illustrated's read of DraftKings early Monday had the total at 42.5, so DraftKings took a full point off the day Tagovailoa was named and has held it there since, while the highest books never moved. Both camps are pricing the same 2025 season, per Yahoo Sports' count: 14 games in Miami, a 6-8 record, 2,660 yards, 20 touchdowns against 15 interceptions, 67.7 percent completions. Penix's nine starts before the knee went 3-6 with 1,982 yards, nine touchdowns and three interceptions. Per game, that is about 220 passing yards for Penix before the knee and about 190 for Tagovailoa in Miami. A book that takes a point off the total the day Tagovailoa is named is pricing that thirty-yard gap, not the two win-loss records. Penix being inactive rather than dressed settles one thing the total had to carry last week: the fallback is Cooper Rush, not the quarterback the market spent two weeks pricing.
What Is Left To Trade
Five rungs still quote on this board, and only one of them is a real price. The Tagovailoa rung has a 99¢ bid and nothing offered below a dollar, so a holder can sell the last cent but nobody can buy in; the position is a wait for the official depth chart, and the rules quoted above pay if he is hurt after the chart prints, so long as the chart still lists him. The rule protects the listing, not the player. The Penix rung's 1¢ ask is a bet that Atlanta publishes a chart contradicting its own head coach, a lottery ticket at 100 contracts for a dollar.
Then there is the print I promised. On Monday, this page called Cooper Rush's 41¢ ask what it was: an offer on the backup, parked where a reader who confuses "QB2" with "starter" might hit it, and our guide to reading a thin Kalshi book covers why an ask like that is bait, not a price. At 7:44 p.m. Monday somebody hit it: four contracts bought at 41¢, the only trade on the Rush rung since the announcement. Since Monday noon, the only prints above a dime on any name but Tagovailoa's are that one and Siemian's six contracts at 14¢, and Rush's is the higher by 27 cents. A dollar and 64 cents, paid for a 41 percent chance that the team's named backup is its listed starter. The ask has since been lowered to 35¢, and it is still bait.
The Bottom Line
The market started picking Tagovailoa on Tuesday, September 1, the books moved the half-point late in the preseason, the Falcons confirmed both on Monday, and Tuesday's tape shows what a finished market does next: it hands its position to people willing to wait for a dollar, and sends its volume to the game. What the announcement settled was a quarterback board. What it left open, the week Penix takes the job, has no board at all, and the only honest number on it is the 55,907 contracts of Penix open interest that say the crowd is sure about Sunday and silent about everything after. The Steelers are -3.5 at 27 books, -3 at three, and 63¢ on the exchange, and none of those numbers waited for Stefanski.
Shopping the opener beyond the exchanges? Our free NFL expert picks and the live NFL odds screen show where Falcons-Steelers is priced at every sportsbook right now.
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