College football's 2026 Heisman market opened the season the way I like a market best: unsure of itself. Notre Dame's CJ Carr leads Kalshi's 35-name board at 12 cents, which in plain terms means the money gives its own top choice about a 12% chance. A board that uncommitted changes the job: instead of picking one winner in August, you hold a small basket of the right cheap names and let the season do the repricing. So this watch page is exactly that: my actual Kalshi portfolio, the games circled to move it, and the running record of every buy and sell as the year plays out. One more thing worth knowing up front, and I'll come back to it: the schedule marches my positions straight through the board's other names all season, and once, in mid-October, straight through each other.
The Quick Answer: I'm holding three Heisman contracts on Kalshi: Josh Hoover (Indiana) at 0.2 units, Gunner Stockton (Georgia) at 0.2 units, and Jeremiah Smith (Ohio State) at 0.1 units, entered at 5, 3 and 7 cents. The full portfolio table, the circled September-through-November dates that reprice it, and the selling plan are below.
The Portfolio: Three Names, Half A Unit
I size positions in units, so the whole book here risks half a unit. If your standard bet is $50, that's $25 across three contracts, which is deliberate: on a futures board where the round-trip cost of buying and selling runs a fifth of the position on Hoover and closer to a third on the cheaper Stockton, small and patient beats big and jumpy.
| Position | Team | Size | Entry (Aug 31) | Bid / ask now | Implied chance | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Josh Hoover | Indiana | 0.2u | 5¢ | 4¢ / 5¢ | 4.5% | Open |
| Gunner Stockton | Georgia | 0.2u | 3¢ | 2¢ / 3¢ | 2.5% | Open |
| Jeremiah Smith | Ohio State | 0.1u | 7¢ | 5¢ / 7¢ | 6% | Open |
Entry prices are the asks on Kalshi's Heisman board as of Monday morning, August 31, 2026. The implied-chance column reads the bid/ask midpoint instead, because on a board where the asks alone add up to more than 100%, the raw ask flatters every name. These quotes move daily, so shop the board before you fire and run the math at whatever price you're actually offered.
The row worth reading twice is Smith's, because the sizing is the analysis. The consensus best player in college football is the smallest position in the book. That's the 90-year receiver problem doing the sizing for me, and his section below explains why I bought him anyway.
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Why These Three Contracts
The two quarterbacks are holdovers. I made the full case for Hoover and Stockton on Saturday, and nothing about either price has changed since. The short version of each, plus the new add:
Josh Hoover, Indiana: The Champions Handed Him The Huddle
Josh Hoover · Indiana · 5¢ ask, 4¢ bid
The case:
- Most career passing yards of any returning FBS quarterback (9,629), with 71 touchdown passes, second-most among returners
- Steps into the Indiana offense that just produced Heisman winner Fernando Mendoza and a 13-0 regular season
- Team context jumps from an 8-4 TCU squad to the defending national champion, ranked No. 6 in the preseason AP poll
- Voters spent all of last December watching this exact program
Mendoza won last year's trophy from this same huddle after leading the country in touchdown passes, and the market wasn't leading with him last August either. Hoover arrives as college football's leading returning passer by career yards, with a coach in Curt Cignetti who named him QB1 entering fall camp. A nickel says the situation was the star. His 9,629 career yards say the quarterback carried plenty of it.
Two honest cautions belong next to that. His 2025 line at TCU came with 13 interceptions (3,472 yards, 29 touchdowns, 65.9% completions, an 8-4 record as the starter), and turnovers are the stat that unwinds a December narrative fastest. He'll also be throwing to a receiver room he has never played a snap with. And the same AI panel that flagged Stockton as underpriced put Hoover at 4.5%, right on his bid/ask midpoint; I'm paying the ask anyway for the schedule, the huddle and the voter familiarity the models can't score, and I said as much when I opened the position.
Gunner Stockton, Georgia: Elite Rates Waiting On Volume
Gunner Stockton · Georgia · 3¢ ask, 2¢ bid
The case:
- 2025 rates from his first full year starting: 24 touchdowns against 5 interceptions, 69.7% completions, a 150.59 passer rating
- 34 total touchdowns once you count the 10 he scored rushing
- Returning starter on the AP's No. 3 team, with Oklahoma, Alabama and Ole Miss waiting on the schedule from late September on
- When we asked a panel of AI models to score the 29 names then on the board without showing them the market, their combined read on Stockton landed at 5.5%, above his 3-cent price, and they named him one of the board's two biggest sleepers
Hoover is volume looking for a stage; Stockton is efficiency looking for volume. Heisman winners get built out of one of those two arcs, and at 3 cents I don't need Georgia to promise 450 pass attempts. I need the market to start wondering whether it might.
Jeremiah Smith, Ohio State: The Best Player, Priced For His Position
Jeremiah Smith · Ohio State · 7¢ ask, 5¢ bid
The case:
- Back-to-back 1,000-yard seasons to open his career: 76 catches for 1,315 yards and 15 touchdowns as a freshman, then 87 for 1,243 and 12 as a unanimous All-American
- Plays for the No. 1 team in the country, so the December spotlight comes built in as long as Ohio State holds serve
- Enters the year with a grievance: he was snubbed for the Biletnikoff in December despite beating winner Makai Lemon in catches, yards and touchdowns
- Roughly nine decades of Heisman voting have produced exactly four wide receiver winners, which is the entire reason the best player in the sport costs 7 cents
Smith is the new add, and he's sized at half the quarterbacks for a reason I unpacked when we covered his price on its own page: voters give this trophy to quarterbacks, and a receiver needs a historic season on a title team to break through. But a 7-cent contract turns $100 into about $1,428 if he wins, stake included, and Smith has two paths the history books undersell. His quarterback Julian Sayin, who completed 77% of his throws last season and trades at 7 cents himself on this same board, is good enough to feed him a monster season. And the voter-grievance angle is real: the last receiver to break through, DeVonta Smith in 2020, did it with a nation-leading season on the sport's best team, which is precisely the setup Ohio State offers. A tenth of a unit is what "the history says no, the tape says maybe" costs.
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The Games That Reprice This Portfolio
Here's the part I promised up top. All three of my teams open September 5 at home against overmatched opponents (North Texas at Indiana, Tennessee State at Georgia, Ball State at Ohio State), and a big day in those games moves prices without moving voters. The real repricing events start the following week, and an odd thing happens when you lay the three schedules side by side: the board keeps playing itself.
| Date | Game | Who it moves | What I'm watching |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sept. 12 | Ohio State at Texas | Smith, Sayin, Manning | Smith against the board's 10-cent name, Arch Manning, on an early national stage |
| Sept. 26 | Oklahoma at Georgia | Stockton, Mateer | Stockton's first marquee test; does Georgia open the passing game or sit on the run |
| Oct. 10 | Georgia at Alabama | Stockton, Russell | The road game that decides whether Georgia is a December team |
| Oct. 17 | Ohio State at Indiana | Hoover, Smith, Sayin | Three of the board's top names on one field, two of them mine |
| Oct. 31 | Ohio State at USC | Smith, Sayin, Maiava | Another board name across the field, in a road spot |
| Nov. 7 | Georgia at Ole Miss | Stockton, Chambliss | Stockton against Trinidad Chambliss, the 8-cent riser |
| Nov. 7 | Oregon at Ohio State | Smith, Sayin, Moore | Dante Moore's 8-cent contract visits Columbus the same day |
| Nov. 14 | USC at Indiana | Hoover, Maiava | Hoover's late-season stage against another board name |
| Nov. 21 | Georgia at South Carolina | Stockton, Sellers | One more board-on-board Saturday, on the road in rivalry season |
October 17 is the one I keep coming back to. The defending champion hosts preseason No. 1 Ohio State, Hoover throws against Smith and Sayin, and whatever happens, this portfolio wins and loses at the same time. I think that's a feature. When your positions are on a collision course, one of them exits that Saturday with the exact kind of nationally televised argument that moves a December voter, and I'd rather own both sides of that argument at a combined 12 cents than pay 12 for the privilege of owning the board's nominal favorite. The same logic runs through November: Stockton gets Chambliss's Ole Miss on the road, Moore's Oregon visits Columbus, and Hoover gets a USC visit in a window when voters are actually paying attention.
The quiet risk sits in September. Indiana's first month gives Hoover three soft defenses (North Texas, Howard, Western Kentucky) and a Northwestern visit that will actually make him work, a runway to stack numbers the market may yawn at, exactly the way it yawned at Mendoza until conference play. Money at these prices has to be comfortable sitting still.
The Board This Week
The full top of the board as of Monday morning, August 31, with the movement since I wrote up the dark horses on Saturday the 29th:
| Player | Team | Last | Bid / ask | Move since Sat. |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| CJ Carr | Notre Dame | 12¢ | 11¢ / 12¢ | none |
| Darian Mensah | Miami | 10¢ | 9¢ / 10¢ | up 1 |
| Arch Manning | Texas | 10¢ | 9¢ / 10¢ | none |
| Dante Moore | Oregon | 8¢ | 7¢ / 8¢ | down 1 |
| Trinidad Chambliss | Ole Miss | 8¢ | 7¢ / 8¢ | up 1 |
| Jeremiah Smith | Ohio State | 7¢ | 5¢ / 7¢ | none |
| Julian Sayin | Ohio State | 7¢ | 6¢ / 7¢ | none |
| Josh Hoover | Indiana | 5¢ | 4¢ / 5¢ | none |
| Keelon Russell | Alabama | 5¢ | 3¢ / 5¢ | down 1 |
| Sam Leavitt | LSU | 4¢ | 3¢ / 4¢ | none |
| Jayden Maiava | USC | 4¢ | 3¢ / 4¢ | none |
| John Mateer | Oklahoma | 4¢ | 3¢ / 4¢ | none |
| Marcel Reed | Texas A&M | 4¢ | 3¢ / 4¢ | none |
| LaNorris Sellers | South Carolina | 3¢ | 2¢ / 3¢ | none |
| Gunner Stockton | Georgia | 3¢ | 2¢ / 3¢ | none |
Prices from Kalshi's exchange, Monday morning, August 31, 2026. Bold rows are portfolio positions. Another 20 names trade at 2 cents or less.
The interesting rows are the two that firmed up over a quiet holiday weekend: Mensah to 10 cents and Chambliss to 8. Mensah's move carries more weight, because his contract's roughly $656,000 in lifetime trading is the most of any name in this market, and money that size creeping toward Carr's 12 cents reads like the crowd auditioning a favorite before a single September snap. That matters to this portfolio for one reason: the sooner the board anoints a leader, the sooner the middle of the board gets marked down to pay for it. My positions want their big games to arrive before that consolidation does, which is exactly why the September dates above matter more than September games should.
The Selling Plan
Building the portfolio is the easy half. The discipline this page exists to enforce is selling, position by position, in public. Three standing rules govern it:
Every position has a price where the case is spent. For Hoover I set that at 8 cents when I opened the position: my own number on him sits nearer 8 than the market's 5, so past 8 the price has caught my read and I'm a seller into strength, even if the football looks great. Stockton's exit number gets published here the week Georgia shows us its real pass-run split, and Smith's the week Ohio State's September tells us whether Sayin plans to feed him; both land in this section before their October dates, and every exit lands in the table above with the price attached.
Sell into spotlight spikes, not after them. Futures prices crest on the Saturday night everyone is talking about a player and leak the following Tuesday. If Hoover hangs 400 yards on Ohio State on October 17, the time to trim is that night, when the argument is loudest.
Respect the toll. A 4-cent bid under a 5-cent ask means a full round trip costs a fifth of the position. Settlement is binary, and the contract language is one sentence, quoted from the Hoover market's own rules: "If Josh Hoover wins the College Football Heisman Trophy in the 2026-2027 college football season, then the market resolves to Yes." Finalists are named December 7 and the trophy is presented December 12, so the default plan is holding to the vote, and selling is reserved for prices that genuinely overrun the case. If cents-to-probability is new to you, the one-page explainer on how these prices work covers it.
A Worked Sell At 8 Cents
Here's what the Hoover exit looks like if it comes. Say a unit is $50, so the 0.2-unit position put $10 on Hoover at 5 cents, which bought 200 contracts. If a big October pushes the bid to 8 cents and I sell the whole position there, those 200 contracts return $16: a 60% gain on the money at risk, banked two months before the vote, on a name that still loses the trophy better than nine times in ten at that price. Hold instead, and the same 200 contracts pay $200 if he wins in December and nothing if he doesn't. The selling plan exists because both of those are good outcomes only if you decided in advance which one you're playing for.
What I won't do is average down mechanically. If Georgia comes out run-heavy through September and Stockton's volume case dies on the vine, a 2-cent quote is the market grading my thesis honestly, and I decline to call that a bargain. Adds happen when new information beats the price, and they'll be logged here with the same stamp as the entries.
How The Watch Works From Here
This page is the series spine, and it updates weekly through the December 12 ceremony: prices re-stamped, positions marked, every buy and sell logged at its actual quote, and the coming week's watch-list games reset. The whole book gets publicly graded right here as positions close, wins and losses alike, because a portfolio you can't audit is just a highlight reel. If you want to bet on the Heisman through a prediction market this fall, this is built to be the bookmark. Same URL every week, and next week's edition lands after the September 5 openers, with the first real repricing date already circled: Ohio State at Texas on the 12th, Smith and Manning on the same field. Between editions, the daily college football market reads live on our Kalshi college football picks hub, and once the games kick off, the Saturday side of my weekend runs through line shopping: our college football odds screen compares every major book's number on the games above, which is how I'll be pricing the spreads around these Heisman spots all fall. The crew also posts free expert picks every day.
The zoomed-out read before my three teams have taken a snap: a 12-cent favorite is a market admitting it hasn't found its 2026 story yet, and last year the story it eventually found was sitting in Bloomington the whole time at a price nobody respected. I'm holding the biggest returning passing résumé in the sport, the best rate profile on a top-three team, and the consensus best player in America, for a combined 15 cents of board price and half a unit of risk. Next Saturday the season starts grading all three.
Futures are one lane of a college football weekend, and the other lane is shopping for the best number on the games themselves. OddsShopper Pro runs the book-to-book comparison automatically, so you can see the best price posted across every major sportsbook before you fire on a Saturday side. It starts with a free week trial, then code LINDY25 takes 25% off your first month.
- Heisman Dark Horses 2026: My Case For Josh Hoover And Gunner Stockton
- Jeremiah Smith Heisman Odds: Kalshi Doubts A Generational WR
- Heisman Trophy Odds 2026: All 29 Names On Kalshi, Scored
- Chambliss Heisman Odds: Kalshi Backs A QB Who Beat The NCAA
The prices here are live market quotes, the positions are my own, and any probabilities from our AI panel are model estimates, not predictions of fact and not financial advice. Kalshi is a CFTC-regulated event-contract exchange; Kalshi's own policy requires traders to be 18+, and availability varies by state. Contracts can go to zero.
New to the exchange side of college football? Start with how to bet college football on Kalshi. Bets are opinions, and no outcome is ever promised. Sportsbook offers referenced here are 21+ where applicable; please gamble responsibly.
