Patriots Vs Seahawks First TD Odds: Kalshi's Mystery Buyer

The first touchdown of the 2026 NFL season was caught by a rookie tight end making the first catch of his career, and on Kalshi's 23-contract board 17 of the other names cost more than he did. Eli Raridon cost 2 cents at the ask. At 9:11 in the second quarter on Wednesday, September 9, New England ran a flea flicker, and Maye's underthrown ball drew a defensive pass-interference flag on A.J. Brown that put the Patriots first-and-goal. Maye then found Raridon in the corner of the end zone from 2 yards out. Kalshi resolved his contract Yes at 9:35 p.m. ET and settled it at $1.00. The other 22 names settled No, at zero — including Elijah Arroyo, the 3-cent Seattle tight end who absorbed a 99,984-contract buy in a single second that afternoon, and including George Holani at 7 cents, which is the ticket this page argued for before kickoff.

Settled. All prices below are as of Wednesday, September 9, 2026, 4:47 and 4:49 p.m. ET, the quotes this page captured before kickoff; the Settled column is what each contract actually paid. Seattle won 13-10.

This page went up three and a half hours before kickoff arguing that the mystery buyer's Arroyo ticket was a lottery ticket rather than information. That part held. What it also argued — that the first touchdown was a two-back question with a cheap third answer in Holani — is the part the game took apart, and the price history says exactly when and how. The number that explains it was sitting in the board all along, four rows from the bottom, and the second that proved it did not print until 9:06:42 that night.

Why First Touchdown Was Its Own Market

A Kalshi first-touchdown contract pays $1 if the named player scores the game's first touchdown and nothing otherwise; if nobody scores one, the "No Touchdown" contract pays instead, and a player who dresses but never takes a snap settles at his pre-game price rather than zero. The order mechanics live on our how to bet NFL on Kalshi guide, and the general shape of Kalshi's player markets is on Kalshi player props.

The trap in that sentence is the word "player." A first-touchdown contract looks like a bet on a person and settles like a bet on a team: it pays only if your guy's offense reaches the end zone before the other one does, and nothing that happens afterward counts. Twenty players and three catch-alls were priced as if the question were which player, and the game asked which sideline.

The pre-game exercise this page recommended was the ratio of a player's first-touchdown ask to his anytime ask, which says how much of his scoring chance the market thinks lives on the early drives. The board mostly sat between 25 and 30 percent — Stevenson 29, Price 30, Smith-Njigba 26 — and Holani was the outlier at 23, a 7-cent first-touchdown ask against a 30-cent anytime ask, which read as a market that expected his touchdowns late. The ratio was not the thing that failed. Holani took eight carries for 29 yards on 46 percent of Seattle's snaps, close to the role the beat report laid out, and the usage work on our Patriots vs Seahawks Kalshi player props page was pointing at something real. It earned his ticket nothing, because New England reached the end zone first and Seattle's backs never reached it at all.

The First Drive Ran Through Backs Who Were Not Starting In February

Both teams opened the season with a running back situation that did not exist when Seattle beat New England 29-13 in Super Bowl LX in February, and first-touchdown contracts are unusually sensitive to that, because the opening script goes to the players the coaches trust.

New England's change happened Tuesday afternoon. TreVeyon Henderson, who scored nine rushing touchdowns as a rookie, missed all three practices and was ruled out with an ankle injury, per the Patriots' injury report analysis published at 4:51 p.m. ET on September 8. Center Ben Brown was out with a knee. That left Stevenson as the lead back, and he ran it 18 times for 51 yards, a 2.8-yard average, and no New England back reached the end zone all night. Corey Kiner, in New England for about a week after arriving from Arizona, took six carries for 11 yards. Stevenson's 13-cent contract was the most expensive on the board, and it settled at zero along with everything else New England ran.

Seattle's change happened over eight months, and then a second one happened six plays into the game. Zach Charbonnet was on the physically-unable-to-perform list after a January ACL tear, and Kenneth Walker III signed with Kansas City in March. On September 3, NBC Sports relayed The Athletic's Andrew Destin reporting that George Holani, the back that report calls Seattle's best pass protector, might take the third-down, short-yardage and goal-line work. The role was real, and that is all the night proved: Holani played 23 snaps, 46 percent of Seattle's offense, and took eight carries to Price's ten. Whether he was the goal-line back is still unknown, because Seattle never got to a goal line. What no report had was the thing that broke Seattle's first hour. Sam Darnold hurt his right hip on Seattle's opening possession, after one completion on two attempts, and Drew Lock took over on the second series. Seattle did not score until a Myers field goal with 3:13 left in the third quarter, nearly 21 minutes of game clock after New England's touchdown had already settled this market.

The Board: All 23 Kalshi First Touchdown Contracts, Settled

Kalshi prices in cents, yes bid / yes ask, as quoted at 4:47 p.m. ET on September 9; the ask is what a buyer paid then. "Anytime ask" is the same player's Kalshi price to score at least once, for scale. Every price is shown as what it cost to collect $100 if the player scored first: on Kalshi that is the ask plus the trade fee, and at a sportsbook it is the stake its first-touchdown-scorer price required. The sportsbook columns come from the OddsShopper board at 4:49 p.m. ET, the cheapest of the up to 24 books that posted each name, with DraftKings beside it for scale. Kalshi settled each contract at $1.00 or zero; the Settled column follows the table's own convention and shows what a $100-payout ticket returned.

Twenty rows down, in a tier of four contracts that all cost the same 2 cents, sits the only one that paid. Kalshi charges its fee on the trade rather than inside the price, 7 cents on each dollar of price-times-one-minus-price, so 100 Raridon contracts at 2 cents cost $2.00 plus 14 cents in fee; the formula is on our Kalshi fees page. That $2.14 returned $100, a shade under 47 times the money, and a sportsbook beat it and so did a second exchange: $1.64 at DraftKings returns 61 times your stake, and ProphetX, itself a peer-to-peer exchange rather than a book, sold the same payout for $1.44, or 69 times. Yahoo Sports noted that he was 60-to-1 at DraftKings, which in a book's notation is the same 61 times your stake back, and that he had not scored a touchdown in his final college season at Notre Dame. Buy every contract in the table at the ask and you paid $1.16 for a payout that could only ever be $1; the 16 cents of markup did not care which name paid, and the name that did was the one nobody had a reason to write about. Including me.

Who Bought 100,000 Arroyo Contracts At 12:51 P.M.

Arroyo's contract had traded 209,596 contracts when this page first ran, which was 21 percent of everything that had traded on the board. It finished at 300,419, and open interest at settlement was 289,709. Read that pair together: of every Arroyo contract ever bought, almost none was ever sold back. The buyers held them to expiry, and expiry paid nothing.

The biggest single second on the price history came at 12:51:10 p.m. ET on Wednesday, when three fills of 66,666, 25,520 and 7,798 contracts printed at 3 cents inside the same instant. It did not move the price — the contract was 2 bid, 3 ask before the sweep and 2 bid, 3 ask after — because the offer at 3 cents was deep enough to absorb 100,000 contracts without anyone lifting the next penny. All told, 294,866 Arroyo contracts traded before kickoff, for about $8,512 including fees, and every one of them settled at zero.

I guessed at a thesis behind that ticket before kickoff and hedged it then: presumably that a defense which had spent its week on Smith-Njigba, Kupp and the two backs could lose the backup tight end on a play-action shot on the first scripted drive. The price history still says nothing about who held the position or why, and it is worth keeping that hedge now that the grading is easy. If that was the idea, it was right about the position and nothing else about the play. It was not the first drive, it was not the first quarter, and it was not a shot play: New England's touchdown came on a 10-play second-quarter drive, and the flea flicker that set it up drew a flag rather than a catch. A tight end did score the first touchdown of the season alone in the corner of an end zone. He was wearing the other uniform. Arroyo played 11 snaps, 22 percent of Seattle's offense, and was not targeted once.

What the price history said

300,419 Arroyo contracts traded and 289,709 were still open at settlement. The buyers were right about what kind of player scores the first touchdown of a season and wrong about which one.

The board's other big money went to a Patriot and fared no better. A.J. Brown finished as the most-traded contract on the board at 489,858 contracts; the 2 p.m. ET hour alone took 50,296 of them at 9 cents, with one second at 2:04:26 taking five fills between 5,000 and 10,467 contracts, all buyers. Brown caught three passes for 26 yards and drew the interference flag that set up Raridon's touchdown, which is as close as a 9-cent contract can come to paying without paying. Every dollar of it settled at zero.

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The 2-Cent Ticket Nobody Was Writing About

While the Arroyo money was the story of the afternoon, somebody was buying the name that won, and the price history gives no reason to think they knew it. Raridon's contract traded 54,018 contracts across 143 fills before kickoff, and 51,171 of them came on game day itself. Not one of them printed above 2 cents. The hour that took the most was 7 p.m. ET, with 14,846 contracts, and the single largest fill was 7,019 contracts at 2 cents at 7:13:26 p.m., about an hour before kickoff and two and a half hours after the price snapshot in the table above. In all, 33,067 Raridon contracts changed hands after this page pulled its prices at 4:47 p.m. — a full 61 percent of the position, invisible to anyone reading the board earlier in the day.

The arithmetic on those 143 fills is the cleanest number in this whole piece. Taken together, every contract bought before kickoff cost about $1,032 in price and roughly $71 in fees, call it $1,103 all in, and the same block paid $54,018. Forty-nine times the money across the whole pre-kickoff book, and none of it required a fill above two pennies. Nobody is shown holding all of it; 143 separate fills over a week is what accumulation looks like when nothing distinguishes a contract from the three others sitting at the same price.

Then came the second that mattered. New England's touchdown drive covered 77 yards in 10 plays and 5 minutes 37 seconds, and it ended at 9:11 on the second-quarter clock, which the price history puts at about 9:06 p.m. ET. At 9:06:42 p.m. ET, 34 fills totalling 10,000 contracts printed inside that one second, every one of them a taker buying yes, at prices from 35 cents to 99, for $9,572. Compare that to the 12:51 p.m. sweep this page led with. The afternoon sweep was 100,000 contracts that moved the price zero cents, because nobody on the other side had learned anything. The evening sweep was a tenth the size and moved the price 97 cents, from the two pennies it had never traded above to the 99 it held until settlement, because by then everyone had. That is the whole difference between a bet and a fact, printed on the same board eight hours apart.

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Where The Exchange Was Cheaper, And Where The Books Were

This page argued before kickoff that Kalshi was the cheaper venue on the running backs and the sportsbooks were cheaper on the tight ends and second receivers, because Kalshi's buyers had pushed the whole 6-cent tier up to a flat price the books did not agree with. The settled board is a brutal test of that claim, because it only graded one row, and that row was a tight end.

The pattern itself held. Buy the whole board at the ask and Kalshi's basket cost $1.16 before the fee and about $1.24 after, against $1.27 at DraftKings across 29 names, $1.26 at FanDuel across 28, and $1.18 at Circa across 27 — different-sized baskets, because the books listed names the exchange never did. Holani really was the one name with a first-drive role that the exchange sold cheaper than every book, $7.46 against a $9.09 floor. It just did not matter, because the only ticket that paid was one where both books beat the exchange: $2.14 on Kalshi against $1.64 at DraftKings, 23 percent cheaper, and $1.44 at ProphetX, 33 percent cheaper. A reader who took the advice about running backs paid the exchange's price and got nothing. A reader who followed the same logic about tight ends — that Kalshi's flat middle tier was dearer than the alternatives — and happened to land on Raridon collected 61 times at DraftKings, or 69 on ProphetX, against the exchange's 47.

That gap did not show up on the chalk. It showed up on a name nobody was pricing for a first-drive role, which is the only place on a board like this one where a third of the ticket price is still lying around. If the player you want is a tight end or a third receiver, the first-touchdown-scorer odds screen shows every book's price, and on this board the sportsbook was the cheaper venue on the name that mattered. The live odds screen, where you can shop the number across every major book does the same job for the game lines that set the table.

Two more things the settled board answered. Eleven names on the sportsbook boards had no Kalshi contract at all before kickoff, and none of them scored; neither did DeMario Douglas, whom I wrote up separately as one of the longer shots on the anytime board and who cost 3 cents here. Emanuel Wilson, whose 3-cent contract would have settled at its pre-game price had he dressed without taking a snap, took two carries for 3 yards, so the clause never came up and his contract went to zero like the rest. And Kalshi listed a twenty-fourth contract after this page published: a Drew Lock market created at 8:44 p.m. ET, 24 minutes into the game and about 20 minutes after Darnold's hip gave out. It traded 98 contracts, last printed at 5 cents. Lock went 16-of-22 for 187 yards and threw the 45-yard touchdown to Smith-Njigba that tied the game at 10 in the fourth quarter, New England having added a Borregales field goal in the third, but he never ran one in, and the last contract listed on this board settled at zero with the other 22.

Grading The 7-Cent Ticket

I wrote before kickoff that if I was buying one first-touchdown contract it was Holani's, at the ask, knowing a 7-cent contract loses 93 times in 100 by its own price. It lost. Here is the honest anatomy, because a lean that goes to zero is only useful if you can say which part of it was wrong.

The role read was right. The September 3 beat note said Holani would take the short-yardage and goal-line work, and he did play 46 percent of Seattle's snaps and split the carries eight to ten with Price. The market's 23-percent ratio, the number this page spent a section arguing with, never got tested at all, because Seattle's backs combined for zero touchdowns on the night and the contract was settled before any of them reached a goal line.

What was wrong was the frame. I priced a player question when the market was asking a team question. Seattle's first drive ended with its quarterback hurt, its next several possessions produced nothing until Myers' 30-yarder with 3:13 left in the third quarter, and New England put a 77-yard drive on the board first. A goal-line back on a 3.5-point favorite is a fine thing to own if his team gets to a goal line before the other one does, and the argument above never priced the branch where it does not. If there is a durable lesson from a $7.46 ticket, it is that the ratio-to-anytime trick tells you where a player's scoring lives inside his own team's drives and tells you nothing about whose drive comes first.

There was one exit. Holani touched 18 cents in-game, in the game's opening minutes between 8:24 and 8:28 p.m. ET, and 2,057 contracts traded at 17 cents or better in that window. A small position could have come out at more than double. The 156,823 contracts that traded before kickoff could not have, and pretending otherwise would be the kind of arithmetic this page exists to argue against.

So the board closes where it opened, with a single second of tape and a wrong reading of it. On Wednesday afternoon the loudest thing on this market was 100,000 contracts on a 3-cent tight end, and everyone who looked at it, including me, spent the day deciding whether to follow it. The answer, delivered at 9:06:42 that evening, was that the tight end thesis was worth about 47 times the money and the jersey was worth everything. The next time a board like this one lists four names at the same two pennies, the honest position is that the price is telling you those four are indistinguishable, which is a fact about the market and not about the players — and the cheapest useful thing you can do is find out which venue selling them wants the least for the same hundred dollars.

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Kalshi prices quoted are the market prices this page captured on Wednesday, September 9, 2026, at 4:47 p.m. ET, and sportsbook prices from the OddsShopper board at 4:49 p.m. ET; the KXNFLFIRSTTD-26SEP09NESEA market closed at 9:33 p.m. ET and settled at 9:35 p.m. ET on September 9, 2026, minutes after the game's first touchdown and well before the final whistle, so all quotes above are historical. Betting involves risk; contracts can go to zero. If you or someone you know has a gambling problem, call 1-800-GAMBLER.

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