Heisman Trophy Odds 2026: All 29 Names On Kalshi, Scored

The 2026 Heisman Trophy odds on Kalshi run 29 separate markets, one per player, and traders have put $3,987,073 through them before a single snap of the season. The crowd's board says Notre Dame's CJ Carr, then Texas' Arch Manning. We had eight AI models score the whole Kalshi Heisman market price-blind, working only from a live, verified data sheet: every player's current 2026 school and position (several changed schools in the portal), his full 2025 stat line, his program's complete 2025 record, and the award's entire winner ledger back to 2000. The panel came back with a different favorite, a hard fade of the market's top name, and one structural number that reframes the whole race.

The Quick Answer

The market's favorite is CJ Carr at 12.5¢. The panel's favorite is Ohio State's Julian Sayin at a 10.5% blend against a 6.5¢ price, and it drops Carr to 4.6%, the widest fade on the board. The panel's single biggest number belongs to nobody on the board at all: a 15.9% chance the winner is someone Kalshi has not listed yet. The full 29-name board, every model's number, the dark horses, and where the machines split from the money are all below.

• Market Pick: CJ Carr, 12.5¢ (about 12% once you re-scale the board's 103¢ total)
• Model Pick: Julian Sayin, 10.5% blend (market 6.5¢)
• Biggest Model Fade: CJ Carr, 4.6% blend vs a 12.5¢ price
• Biggest Sleeper Gap: Gunner Stockton, 5.0% blend vs 3.5¢, and Kewan Lacy, 2.4% vs half a cent
• The Panel's Logic In One Line: the Heisman goes to efficient quarterbacks on playoff teams, and Sayin's 77% completion season on 12-2 Ohio State is the cleanest such profile listed.

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The Market At A Glance

Venue	Kalshi, a CFTC-regulated event-contract exchange (18+; availability varies by state, as of July 2026)
The Event	"College Football Heisman Trophy Winner" for the 2026-2027 season (Kalshi event KXHEISMAN-27), 29 separate yes/no player contracts
The Contract	Verbatim: "If [player] wins the College Football Heisman Trophy in the 2026-2027 college football season, then the market resolves to Yes"
Settlement	Per Kalshi's sport-award contract terms, resolution follows the official announcement by the award's voting body, in a named hierarchy of sources; leaked results and media reports alone are insufficient, and revisions made after expiration do not count
The Catch	There is no "Field" contract: if anyone not listed wins, all 29 contracts resolve NO
Timing	The award is presented in December 2026; contracts carry an expected expiration of January 1, 2027 and can close early once the winner is announced
Volume	$3,987,073 traded across the event as of July 30, 2026
Prices Below As Of	July 30, 2026 (bid-ask midpoints; the 29 contracts trade in 29 independent order books, so the prices sum to about 103¢ rather than 100)

These are model estimates, not predictions of fact and not financial advice. Kalshi event contracts trade on a CFTC-regulated exchange; you must be 18 or older and in an eligible state to participate.

Every number in this piece gets graded in public once the market settles: the full graded scoreboard keeps the panel's complete record, wins and misses alike.

What Actually Wins A Heisman

Before any name, the award's structure decides most of this board, and it is exactly what the panel leaned on. The winner ledger since 2000 reads as two iron laws:

• It Is A Quarterback Award. 21 of the last 26 winners played quarterback. The five exceptions: Reggie Bush (2005, USC), Mark Ingram II (2009, Alabama), Derrick Henry (2015, Alabama), DeVonta Smith (2020, Alabama), and Travis Hunter (2024, Colorado), the ledger's one two-way winner, listed at both cornerback and wide receiver. The shared thread is a historic individual season, not merely a great one, and that became the panel's test for every non-quarterback below: never "can it happen," always "is THAT kind of season plausibly on the table."
• It Tracks Team Success. The ledger runs through programs like Ohio State, USC, Oklahoma, Alabama, LSU, and Florida State: whoever wins, his team was in the national conversation that year. Big numbers on a team out of that conversation do not get podium invitations, which is why the panel priced the board's gaudiest stat line dead last (more on Drew Mestemaker below).

One more structural fact frames 2026: the most recent winner, Indiana's Fernando Mendoza, took the 2025 trophy in the middle of a season Indiana finished 16-0 with a national title, and the quarterback who now inherits that same Indiana offense is on this board.

The Board: All 29 Names

Sorted by the panel's blended probability. The blend is the equal-weight mean of eight models' numbers after a revision round in which each model read the others' anonymized reasoning and could adjust.

Player	School	Kalshi Price	AI Blend
Julian Sayin	Ohio State (QB)	6.5¢	10.5%
Arch Manning	Texas (QB)	11.5¢	8.7%
Dante Moore	Oregon (QB)	5.5¢	8.0%
Darian Mensah	Miami (QB)	9¢	7.5%
Trinidad Chambliss	Ole Miss (QB)	6.5¢	6.0%
Gunner Stockton	Georgia (QB)	3.5¢	5.0%
CJ Carr	Notre Dame (QB)	12.5¢	4.6%
Josh Hoover	Indiana (QB)	5.5¢	3.9%
Jeremiah Smith	Ohio State (WR)	4¢	3.6%
Marcel Reed	Texas A&M (QB)	4.5¢	2.7%
Kewan Lacy	Ole Miss (RB)	0.5¢	2.4%
Jayden Maiava	USC (QB)	3.5¢	2.3%
Brendan Sorsby	Texas Tech (QB)	0.5¢	1.9%
Demond Williams Jr.	Washington (QB)	1.5¢	1.9%
Bryce Underwood	Michigan (QB)	1.5¢	1.8%
Keelon Russell	Alabama (QB)	2.5¢	1.8%
Will Hammond	Texas Tech (QB)	2.5¢	1.6%
John Mateer	Oklahoma (QB)	5.5¢	1.2%
Byrum Brown	Auburn (QB)	1.5¢	1.2%
Austin Mack	Alabama (QB)	0.5¢	1.1%
Kevin Jennings	SMU (QB)	1.5¢	1.0%
Sam Leavitt	LSU (QB)	3¢	0.8%
LaNorris Sellers	South Carolina (QB)	1.5¢	0.8%
Rocco Becht	Penn State (QB)	1.5¢	0.7%
Bo Jackson	Ohio State (RB)	0.5¢	0.7%
Malachi Toney	Miami (WR)	2.5¢	0.7%
Ahmad Hardy	Missouri (RB)	0.5¢	0.6%
Jaron-Keawe Sagapolutele	California (QB)	1.5¢	0.5%
Drew Mestemaker	Oklahoma State (QB)	1.5¢	0.4%
The Field (any unlisted player)	—	no contract	15.9%

These are model estimates, not predictions of fact and not financial advice. A 0.5¢ entry is a 0-bid, 1¢-ask book: the exchange's minimum tick shapes the bottom of the board, so read the longshot prices as "under a cent," not as precise probabilities.

Every Seat's Number

The full first-round board, before the revision round, so you can see where the eight seats actually disagreed rather than just the averaged result.

Player	Kalshi	Fable	Opus	Sonnet	GPT	Gemini	GLM	Kimi	DeepSeek
Julian Sayin	6.5¢	12.0	10.5	8.0	7.8	10.6	7.9	14.5	9.2
Arch Manning	11.5¢	11.0	7.0	9.5	9.5	11.6	6.9	9.5	8.2
Dante Moore	5.5¢	7.0	8.0	5.5	7.2	8.7	9.9	12.0	6.1
Darian Mensah	9¢	8.0	6.0	8.0	6.0	7.7	14.8	11.5	6.6
Trinidad Chambliss	6.5¢	6.0	4.0	6.7	5.2	6.8	13.8	3.5	7.1
Gunner Stockton	3.5¢	4.0	3.2	5.0	6.4	6.8	2.0	6.0	5.1
CJ Carr	12.5¢	4.0	4.5	4.5	3.9	3.9	1.5	8.3	4.6
Josh Hoover	5.5¢	5.0	3.5	4.0	4.5	4.8	11.8	3.5	0.3
Jeremiah Smith	4¢	5.0	3.2	11.0	2.5	1.4	1.5	1.0	3.1
Marcel Reed	4.5¢	3.0	3.2	2.0	3.8	4.8	4.9	1.5	2.0
Kewan Lacy	0.5¢	2.0	1.2	7.0	1.0	1.4	2.0	2.0	2.0
Jayden Maiava	3.5¢	1.5	1.6	1.5	3.0	2.9	5.9	2.0	2.0
Brendan Sorsby	0.5¢	0.3	1.0	1.5	3.3	3.9	0.5	3.0	2.5
Demond Williams Jr.	1.5¢	1.5	2.0	1.8	2.9	1.9	3.0	1.5	1.5
Bryce Underwood	1.5¢	3.0	3.2	3.5	1.7	1.9	0.5	1.5	1.5
Keelon Russell	2.5¢	1.0	2.8	0.4	1.4	2.4	0.5	1.5	0.5
Will Hammond	2.5¢	1.0	1.8	2.5	0.4	0.5	0.5	0.3	0.5
John Mateer	5.5¢	2.0	1.5	0.8	2.4	1.0	2.0	0.3	1.0
Byrum Brown	1.5¢	0.8	1.2	1.3	2.2	1.0	0.5	2.0	2.5
Austin Mack	0.5¢	0.5	0.9	0.5	2.0	2.4	0.5	0.3	0.5
Kevin Jennings	1.5¢	1.0	1.0	0.9	1.4	1.9	2.0	0.3	0.8
Sam Leavitt	3¢	1.5	1.8	0.7	1.8	1.0	0.5	0.3	1.0
LaNorris Sellers	1.5¢	2.0	1.5	0.9	0.8	0.5	0.5	0.3	0.5
Rocco Becht	1.5¢	0.7	0.8	0.7	0.9	1.0	1.5	0.3	0.8
Bo Jackson	0.5¢	1.0	0.6	1.0	0.6	0.5	0.5	0.3	1.0
Malachi Toney	2.5¢	1.0	1.0	0.9	0.5	0.5	0.5	0.5	1.5
Ahmad Hardy	0.5¢	1.2	0.8	1.0	0.3	1.0	0.5	0.5	1.2
Jaron-Keawe Sagapolutele	1.5¢	0.7	0.6	0.4	0.7	0.5	0.5	0.3	0.3
Drew Mestemaker	1.5¢	0.4	0.6	0.5	0.6	1.0	0.5	1.5	0.2
The Field	—	12.0	21.0	8.0	15.3	5.8	2.5	10.0	25.5

These are model estimates, not predictions of fact and not financial advice.

How these numbers were made. Eight model seats (Claude Fable, Claude Opus, Claude Sonnet, GPT, Gemini, GLM, Kimi, and DeepSeek) each priced the entire 30-outcome partition, the 29 contracts plus the field, in a single pass, with the numbers required to sum to 100. None saw a market price. Each worked from the same fetched data card: every player's roster-verified 2026 school and position, class, full 2025 stat line, his program's complete 2025 win-loss record, and the 2000-2025 winner ledger, with an explicit warning that no 2026 games have been played and no camp news was included. After round one, each seat read the other seven's anonymized numbers and reasoning and could revise; the blend above uses the revised round. Every number, both rounds, lands in our public Model Verdict ledger, where each price-blind call is graded against the real settlement when the market resolves. Read the tables as model estimates with a public report card attached, not as certainties.

Julian Sayin, Ohio State: The Panel's Favorite

All eight seats put Sayin first after the revision round, and the case is the same everywhere: he is the intersection of the award's two iron laws. Sayin completed 77.0% of his passes in 2025, threw 32 touchdowns against 8 interceptions for 3,610 yards, and did it on a 12-2 Ohio State team that will open 2026 in the national-title conversation. Fable's summary is the panel's: "32/8 at 77.0% completion on 12-2 Ohio State is the cleanest efficiency-plus-team profile on the card."

"Julian Sayin feels underrated; his 32 TDs against only 8 INTs with a 77% completion rate on a 12-2 Ohio State team represents elite efficiency that could explode in 2026." — GLM

The one cap the models kept coming back to: Ohio State's supporting cast is so good that it splits his own highlight reel. Jeremiah Smith and Bo Jackson are on this same board, and a quarterback whose receiver is a Heisman candidate in his own right shares the camera. That is why Sayin blends to 10.5% rather than running away, and that is still four points clear of his re-scaled market share.

CJ Carr, Notre Dame: The Market's Favorite And The Panel's Hardest Fade

The market's top price gets the panel's biggest fade: 12.5¢ against a 4.6% blend. In the first round only Kimi (8.3) priced him above 5, and even its revised number came back to earth. Nobody disputes the profile: Carr threw for 2,741 yards with 24 touchdowns and 6 interceptions at 66.6%, and Notre Dame went 10-2. The panel's objection is comparative: on this specific board, Carr's efficiency season is the fourth or fifth best quarterback resume, on a team whose 2025 record trails Ohio State, Oregon, Miami, and Ole Miss. A 12.5¢ price makes him the single most likely winner in America; the models read him as one strong contender among six or seven, with an independent-schedule path that gives voters fewer marquee data points. That gap, roughly 7.5 points, is the widest on the board and the clearest place where the crowd and the machines simply disagree.

Arch Manning, Texas: The Brand Premium, Quantified

Manning is the rare name where the panel and the market are close and both are big: 11.5¢ against an 8.7% blend, the panel's second-highest number. The models priced the production, 3,163 passing yards, 26 touchdowns, and 10 rushing scores on a 10-3 Texas team, and then explicitly discounted the rest.

"While Texas is a contender, his 61.4% completion rate lags the top tier, meaning his price carries a massive, unearned brand premium." — Gemini

That is the panel's whole Manning file in one sentence: real dual-threat case, real contender, and a completion rate more than 15 points below Sayin's. If Manning tightens the accuracy even modestly, the rushing touchdowns and the name make him the most votable player in the sport, which is why no seat dropped him below 6.9.

Dante Moore, Oregon And Darian Mensah, Miami: The Efficiency Tier

The panel's third and fourth names split into a value case and a confirmation. Moore is the value case: 71.8% completion for 3,565 yards and 30 touchdowns on a 13-2 Oregon team, blending to 8.0% against just 5.5¢, one of the board's cleanest positive gaps. Mensah is the confirmation: 34 touchdowns against 6 interceptions for 3,973 yards, the most passing yards of any returning quarterback on a 12-win program, landing at 7.5% against a 9¢ price, which says the market already has him about right. GLM was the table's loudest Mensah believer at 14.8 in round one; the rest of the panel pulled it toward the middle, but nobody put him lower than 6.

Trinidad Chambliss, Ole Miss And Gunner Stockton, Georgia: The Proven Hands

Chambliss put up 3,937 passing yards with only 3 interceptions, plus 527 rushing yards, for a 13-2 Ole Miss team, and blends to 6.0% against 6.5¢: priced fairly, says the panel. Stockton is the sleeper. A redshirt senior with a 24-to-5 touchdown line at 69.7% completion, 462 rushing yards and 10 rushing scores on 12-2 Georgia, he blends to 5.0% against a 3.5¢ price. GPT and Gemini both put him at 6.4-6.8, reading him as a dual-threat on a permanent contender whose price reflects last year's modest passing volume rather than his 2026 situation.

Josh Hoover, Indiana: The Mendoza Path, Discounted

Hoover now runs the offense that just produced a Heisman winner, at a program coming off a 16-0 national-championship season. He also threw 13 interceptions in 2025, and the panel split on what matters more. GLM's first-round case was blunt: 11.8%, top-three, for inheriting the sport's best situation. The majority read was Fable's: "inheriting 16-0 Indiana's scheme a year after it minted Mendoza is a live path, but 13 INTs and voter fatigue on a repeat school argue against" a top-tier number. He settles at 3.9% against 5.5¢, a mild fade of a fashionable pick.

The Non-QB Question: Jeremiah Smith And The Exception Test

The card forced every model to test non-quarterbacks against the actual exception profiles, not against vibes, and only one name survived it. Smith caught 87 passes for 1,243 yards and 12 touchdowns as Ohio State's alpha receiver, and the panel blends him to 3.6% against 4¢: the DeVonta Smith template, a record-chasing receiver on a champion-caliber team, is a real path, just a narrow one that also requires out-shining his own quarterback, who happens to be the panel's favorite. Ole Miss running back Kewan Lacy, whose 1,567 yards and 24 rushing touchdowns are the closest thing on the board to a Henry-style volume profile, gets the residue at 2.4%. Miami's Malachi Toney (109 catches for 1,211 yards), Missouri's Ahmad Hardy (1,649 rushing yards, the most on this card), and Ohio State's Bo Jackson all priced under 1%: excellent players whose plausible 2026 seasons are not the historic kind the ledger demands.

Where The Panel Splits From The Money

• The Panel Wants: Sayin (+4.2 points against his re-scaled price), Moore (+2.7), Lacy (+1.9), Stockton (+1.6), Sorsby (+1.4).
• The Panel Fades: Carr (−7.5, the board's biggest gap), John Mateer (−4.1: a 14-touchdown, 11-interception 2025 line at 5.5¢ was the panel's least favorite price on the board), Sam Leavitt (−2.1: a 1,628-yard, 10-touchdown 2025 season priced at 3¢ on a program coming off 7-6), Manning (−2.5, a mild trim rather than a rejection), and Malachi Toney (−1.7, the exception test again).
• Priced About Right: Mensah, Chambliss, Jeremiah Smith, Hoover within a point and a half either way.

Dark Horses The Panel Won't Dismiss

The board's whole bottom half trades at 2.5¢ or less, and the panel's job there was to say which of those prices are hiding a real path. Four are worth naming:

• Kewan Lacy, Ole Miss (0.5¢, blend 2.4%). Every seat gave him a real number; Sonnet went to 7.0. Twenty-four rushing touchdowns on a 13-2 team is the raw material of a Henry season, priced at the exchange minimum.
• Brendan Sorsby, Texas Tech (0.5¢, blend 1.9%). The top-rated quarterback in the winter transfer portal arrives from Cincinnati with a 27-touchdown, 5-interception season plus 580 rushing yards, joining a Texas Tech program that just went 12-2. Gemini and GPT both put him over 3%, six times his price.
• Bryce Underwood, Michigan (1.5¢, blend 1.8%). The panel's classic year-two leap candidate: modest 2025 numbers (2,428 yards, 11 touchdowns), enormous pedigree, and three seats at 3.0 or higher.
• The Alabama Room (Russell 2.5¢ + Mack 0.5¢, combined blend 2.9%). The seats disagreed about which Alabama quarterback to like, which is itself information. Opus took Keelon Russell at 2.8, "a sophomore taking Alabama's job, the exact Bryce Young shape"; Gemini and GPT leaned Austin Mack at 2.0-2.4. Whoever wins the job inherits an 11-win program and the ledger's most decorated Heisman pipeline of the last two decades.

And one anti-dark-horse: Drew Mestemaker owns the board's gaudiest stat line, 4,379 passing yards and 34 touchdowns for a 12-2 North Texas team, and the panel's lowest blend, 0.4%, because he carries it to an Oklahoma State program coming off 1-11. Opus: "4,379 yards to a 1-11 team is a disqualifier, not an argument." [Editor's note: the compression cuts a corner — the 4,379 yards came at North Texas, which went 12-2; the 1-11 record belongs to Oklahoma State, the team Mestemaker joins for 2026. The panel's objection is about where he plays now, and the verdict stands as published.] Kimi filed the lone dissent worth keeping: "if the Cowboys improve to bowl eligibility, his production could force consideration."

What Changed When The Models Read Each Other

The revision round is where this board earned its shape, and three moves stand out. GLM walked in with the panel's most contrarian top: Mensah 14.8, Chambliss 13.8, Hoover 11.8, and a nearly empty 2.5% field; after reading the other seven, it re-crowned Sayin, cut Hoover by two thirds, and multiplied its field number by eight. Sonnet made the opposite kind of concession on Jeremiah Smith, dropping him from a table-high 11.0 to 4.5 after absorbing the cannibalization argument, that a receiver cannot out-Heisman the quarterback throwing to him without a season the ledger has seen roughly once. And GPT kept its field number high while the low seats climbed toward it, with the line that best explains the board's biggest cell: "29 names still cannot cover every 2026 breakout quarterback, and recent Heisman markets often miss the eventual riser." Consensus formed where the evidence was, not where the loudest number sat: every seat's revised board has Sayin first, and every seat's field number landed between 10 and 21.

How To Read These Prices

Work one example. Carr's 12.5¢ is not a clean "12.5% chance": the 29 contracts are quoted in 29 independent order books, and their mids sum to about 103¢ rather than 100, so his re-scaled share is closer to 12%. The panel's 4.6% against that 12% is the real size of the fade. Three honest frictions apply to everything above. First, eligibility: Kalshi is a CFTC-regulated event-contract exchange, 18+ and state-dependent, not a sportsbook. Second, liquidity: most of this board trades under 3¢ on thin books, so the longshot "prices" are soft, and converting cents to odds matters more than usual before comparing anything to a sportsbook number. Third, time: this market does not settle until the award is announced in December, so a position holds capital for five months while the race gets decided by fall camps, injuries, and September schedules this page deliberately does not pretend to know. Award futures are Kalshi's lane; for the week-to-week football slate, our live odds screen and free expert picks today do the same price-context work across the major books.

The Bottom Line

Award races are this panel's best-tested lane; the same price-blind protocol runs on the 2026 Emmys board, where the market's near-lock favorite gets the same skeptical treatment CJ Carr gets here.

Most Heisman Trophy predictions hand you a single name. A market hands you a distribution, and the two disagree here in a specific way: the market says the 2026 favorite is CJ Carr, while our panel says the favorite is Julian Sayin and that the market's favorite is its biggest mistake. But the number that best describes this race is the one with no contract attached: 15.9% on the field means the panel thinks roughly one December in six ends with a winner Kalshi is not even listing in July, which is both a caution about every price above and a reason this board will be worth re-reading when the portal's last quarterbacks settle and the first CFP rankings drop. The same panel scores the sport's team version of this question on the college football championship board, the NFL's award twin in the NFL MVP model verdict, the fantasy QB1 board built on the same quarterback-structure logic, and the Super Bowl LXI field; for the football version of this venue itself, start with how to bet NFL games on Kalshi. Method cousin: the 2026 Ballon d'Or model verdict runs this exact playbook on soccer's individual award.

Verdicts generated July 30, 2026, price-blind, with a revision round. Prices as of July 30, 2026. Panel: Claude Fable, Claude Opus, Claude Sonnet, GPT, Gemini, GLM, Kimi, and DeepSeek. These are model estimates, not predictions of fact and not financial advice.

Prices on this page are Kalshi's book. If you also trade on Polymarket, code OS4 gets new users a $20 bonus on a $10 deposit — affiliate link; terms as stated by Polymarket; 18+, availability varies by state.