NFC West Odds 2026: The Favorite Lost. The Panel Was Already There

Updated September 11, 2026 · 20 min read · by Eric Lindquist

The Quick Answer

NFC West odds on Kalshi as of the morning of September 11, 2026: the Los Angeles Rams are 38 cents, the San Francisco 49ers 35.5, the defending Super Bowl champion Seattle Seahawks 31.5, and Arizona is under a penny. One 27-7 loss in Melbourne cut the Rams from 55.5 cents to the number a price-blind AI panel gave them in August. The tape of Thursday night's move, print by print, and the team the panel and the market now disagree about most, are below.

Here is the strangest fact on this page. Two weeks before the season, six models read the same data card with every price stripped out and put the Los Angeles Rams at 38.5 percent to win the NFC West. The market said 48 that day, paid 55.5 on Thursday morning after Sam Darnold's hip, and then watched the Rams lose by 20 in Australia that night. This morning the Rams are 37 bid, 39 ask. The market took 16 days and a blowout to arrive at the panel's number, and it got there by a road the panel never argued: nothing about Melbourne was in the August case for a discount. The board that came out the other side has three teams inside seven cents, and the disagreement worth reading has moved from the top line to the middle one. That is the story of this update, and I will get to what I think the price is worth at the end, because a 20-point loss and a fair price are not the same thing.

New to event contracts? How to trade NFL on Kalshi covers how these contracts price and settle before you read a board like this one.

The Market

Kalshi's NFC West event (KXNFLNFCWEST-27) lists the division's four teams as separate yes-or-no contracts. The settlement language is one sentence with the team name swapped. Seattle's reads: "If Seattle wins the Pro Football NFC West Division, then the market resolves to Yes."

It settles on the division title, not a playoff berth: the 12-5 Rams reached the NFC title game last season and still settled NO on this contract.

The board has traded about 522,000 contracts across the four teams, up from 485,000 yesterday morning. The Rams' contract has now traded roughly 220,000 on its own and carries about 118,800 contracts of open interest, the most on the board. The quotes are not equally deep, and that matters for reading the prices below: San Francisco and Seattle both show a one-cent spread with more than 400 contracts on the bid, while the Rams' spread is two cents and the bid holds five contracts. The favorite's price is the one on this board that has been tested least since the game ended.

Kalshi is a CFTC-regulated exchange. Participation is 18+, and availability varies by state. Prices below are the midpoint of the live bid and ask at 6:03 a.m. ET on September 11, 2026. The panel's numbers were generated on August 26, before the season began, and have not been re-run since; they are shown next to three dates' prices so you can see what moved, and when.

The Board

Every seat received the same fetched data card: final 2025 standings, play-level efficiency for all 32 teams, the 2026 schedule, current rosters and dated injury notes, with every price stripped out. The AI blend below is the median of the seats' estimates after a revision round in which each model read the others' reasoning with the names removed. The median is the middle number rather than an average, so one outlier cannot drag the blend around.

Team	2025 record, point differential, division record	Kalshi, Sep 11	Kalshi, Sep 10	Kalshi, Aug 26	AI blend (Aug 26, price-blind)
Los Angeles Rams	12-5, +172, 4-2	38.0¢	55.5¢	48.0¢	38.5%
San Francisco 49ers	12-5, +66, 4-2	35.5¢	20.5¢	21.5¢	24.5%
Seattle Seahawks	14-3, +191, 4-2	31.5¢	28.5¢	28.5¢	32.5%
Arizona Cardinals	3-14, -133, 0-6	0.5¢	0.5¢	1.5¢	4.0%

The row to read twice is the top one. On August 26 the market and the panel disagreed about the Rams by 9.5 points; yesterday morning, by 17; this morning, by half a point. The panel has not moved. The market has been to 60 cents and back, and nothing in the August reasoning predicted either leg of the trip, which is another way of saying that agreement and being right are different things.

How To Read This Board

A price in cents is roughly the market's probability, and a contract that resolves yes pays $1; Arizona's still has no bid this morning, zero on one side and a penny on the other.

Because the NFL always names one champion, the four contracts cover every outcome between them. They are still four separately quoted markets, so the midpoints need not total exactly 100. In August they summed to 99.5 cents. Yesterday morning they summed to 105, and I wrote here that the excess said the Rams' price had run ahead of what the other three gave back. This morning they still sum to 105.5. The excess now lives on the other side of the board: the 49ers and the Seahawks were bought through the fourth quarter and past midnight, and the bids resting under them this morning are more than 400 contracts deep, while the Rams' 38 rests on five. The price on this board that has been tested least is the favorite's, which a buyer should know before paying 39 and a seller before hitting 37.

The single biggest disagreement on the board has moved. In August and again yesterday morning it was the Rams, the market above the panel by up to 17 points. This morning it is San Francisco: 35.5 cents against a 24.5 percent blend, 11 points, and this time the market is the optimist. Two honest caveats belong next to that gap, the same two as before. When these six seats have disagreed with a market price by ten cents or more, about 2,800 graded calls on the public scoreboard, the market has been right roughly two thirds of the time. And the panel scored this division with Sam Darnold healthy and Melbourne unplayed. It has not been asked again since either, so the gap is an argument about the evidence as it stood in August, not a signal about this morning.

More live boards from the same panel: Super Bowl LXI champion, where the Rams are 14.5¢, the 49ers 7.5¢ and Seattle 6.5¢ · NFC 1 seed · NFC North. For the trading side of this board, what I would and would not do at these prices is in this morning's column; this page is the record. Prices fetched September 11, 2026.

Every Seat's Number

The full per-model board, after the revision round. On a phone this table scrolls sideways; the board above carries the headline numbers.

Team	ChatGPT	Gemini	Claude Fable	Claude Opus	Claude Sonnet	Kimi
Los Angeles Rams	39.0%	38.0%	38.0%	35.0%	40.0%	40.0%
Seattle Seahawks	32.0%	35.0%	32.0%	38.0%	31.0%	33.0%
San Francisco 49ers	25.0%	24.0%	25.0%	24.0%	25.0%	23.0%
Arizona Cardinals	4.0%	3.0%	5.0%	3.0%	4.0%	4.0%

Read down the San Francisco column and the finding is how little the seats argued about it. Six models, a two-point spread, none above 25. One game later the market has landed on the Rams' row and left the 49ers' row 11 points behind; not one seat is within ten of this morning's price.

Every seat on this panel is graded against real market settlements — records to date: Claude Fable 88% on 2,983 graded calls · Claude Opus 87% on 3,072 graded calls · Claude Sonnet 86% on 3,048 graded calls · GPT 85% on 9,722 graded calls · Gemini 86% on 8,779 graded calls · Kimi 86% on 4,394 graded calls. Recomputed daily across all graded calls, most of them close to the market price; the full scoreboard is public.

Model estimates generated August 26, 2026, price-blind from live fetched data. These are model estimates, not predictions of fact and not financial advice. Models are frequently wrong; the market price reflects real traders' money. Kalshi is a CFTC-regulated exchange; 18+, availability varies by state.

Every number in this piece gets graded in public once the market settles. The running tally lives on the full graded scoreboard. Six of the panel's eight seats returned a board for this market.

What Moved The Board: Melbourne, Print By Print

The game is not a mystery, and neither is the tape. San Francisco beat Los Angeles 27-7 at the Melbourne Cricket Ground on Thursday night, September 10, in front of 100,021 people, the NFL's first regular-season game in Australia. Brock Purdy went 25-of-34 for 205 yards and three touchdowns, to Demarcus Robinson from 39 yards, Mike Evans from 2 and Deebo Samuel from 15. The 49ers ran for 174 yards and converted 7 of 12 third downs. Matthew Stafford, the reigning MVP, went 15-of-25 for 155 yards with an interception, was stopped on a fourth-down sneak from the San Francisco 1 in the third quarter, and gave way to Stetson Bennett IV late. "Probably only had two good drives, to be honest," Stafford said afterward. The Rams' only score was a Kyren Williams run three seconds into the second quarter. DraftKings had closed them as 3.5-point favorites.

The selling started before kickoff, which is the first thing worth knowing. At 5:05 p.m. ET, three and a half hours before the game, a 10,000-contract sale printed at 54 cents, the largest Rams trade of the day, and open interest fell by about 5,200 contracts in that hour, so at least half of it was an existing holder getting out rather than a new short. A 2,874-contract sale at 53 followed at 6:06 p.m. Those two prints took the bid from 54 to 51 hours before either team had taken the field. Whether that was information or nerves, I cannot tell you; the tape only says somebody with a large position did not want to hold it through the game.

The first snap came at 8:37 p.m. ET and the first two hours were quiet: about 280 contracts in the eight o'clock hour, 349 in the nine, most of them small buys at 52 to 54 while the Rams led 7-3 and then trailed 10-7 at the half. The move came in the hour after ten. San Francisco scored on its first drive of the second half to lead 17-7, stopped Stafford on the sneak at 10:31, then drove 99 yards to make it 24-7 at 10:44. The Rams' contract printed 710 and 522 contracts sold at 45 in the minute after that touchdown. A 56-yard field goal made it 27-7 at 10:57, and at 10:58 a 1,000-contract sale went through at 35. Every one of the 2,910 contracts that traded between 10 and 11 p.m. was seller-initiated, and the low print was 33. Then the market did what markets do after a panic: two buys at 49 lifted a stale ask at 11:13, 1,450 contracts sold back at 36 and 37 at 11:27, and the contract closed the hour at 37 bid, 39 ask. It traded 321 contracts in the first hour after midnight and never more than 36 in any hour after that, and the quote has sat at 37/39 for six hours, bar a one-cent uptick to 38 in the five o'clock hour.

The 49ers' side is the mirror image, with one difference: it was bought, not sold, and it kept going after the whistle. Their contract traded between 20 and 23 all Thursday until the third quarter. Buyers took 3,307 contracts between 10 and 11 p.m. at 22 to 28, and another 2,205 in the hour after at 25 to 44, 88 percent of them lifting the ask; the high print of the night was 44 cents. The quote settled at 33 bid, 36 ask by 1 a.m. and had a 426-contract bid at 35 by six. Seattle drifted up in the same window without a game of its own, from 29 bid on Thursday afternoon to 31 bid, 32 ask by morning, with 1,184 contracts bought at 34 at 11:19 p.m. That is the second thing the tape says: the cents the Rams gave up went to both rivals, but almost all of them went to the team that took the field.

The third thing it says is what has not happened. Since the 11 p.m. hour ended, the bid has held at 37 and nobody has stepped in to buy the dip in size. A board that repriced on 6,500 contracts in two hours is now waiting on a bid that is five contracts deep, and the next print of any size will move it.

What Moved It Wednesday: Five Snaps In Seattle, And The MRI

The move before this one is worth keeping on the page, because the market has now had both pieces of news and priced them in opposite directions.

Seattle opened the season at home against New England on Wednesday, September 9. On third down of its first possession, Sam Darnold was sacked by the Patriots' Dre'Mont Jones and injured his hip; his night was five snaps. Drew Lock played the rest of the game, went 16-of-22 for 187 yards, and Seattle won 13-10. Seattle's division contract traded from 32 to a low of 22 that night, and the Rams' contract went from 49 to a high of 60 before either had played a division game.

The MRI came back Thursday. Mike Macdonald said on his radio show on Seattle Sports 710 AM that the hip is structurally intact and the injury is muscular, "really, really good news," while adding that "it is painful, though." Sources told ESPN's Adam Schefter and NFL Network's Ian Rapoport that Darnold is expected to miss the Week 2 game at Arizona on September 20 and return "sooner rather than later." Macdonald: "I'm kind of thinking Drew is going to play." Seattle's Week 2 game contract against Arizona sits at 72 bid, 74 ask this morning, down from a prior close of 76, after the "expected to miss Week 2" report. The division contract did nothing on the scan: it sat at 28 and 29 bid from Thursday afternoon through nine o'clock, and the three cents it gained came between 10 p.m. and midnight, while the Rams were losing.

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Los Angeles Rams: The Panel's Number, Reached The Wrong Way

The case for Los Angeles was the strongest on this page in August, and one game in Australia did not delete the ledger it was built on. It did add a page to it.

Start underneath the record. Across every regular-season play in 2025, the Rams averaged +0.149 expected points added per play on offense, second in the NFL. Expected points added, or EPA, is simply how much a play moved a team's scoring expectation; average it across a season and you get a cleaner read on an offense than points, because it does not care whether a drive started on the opponent's 20 or its own 5. The Rams also finished first in the league in offensive success rate, the share of plays that gained positive EPA, at 52.2 percent. First in early-down EPA. First in rushing success rate at 50.1 percent. And first in average depth of target at 9.3 yards: the league's most vertical passing offense and its most consistently efficient one at the same time, a combination that is rare.

Their defense was not a passenger. Los Angeles allowed -0.067 EPA per play, seventh, and got home on 7.1 percent of opponent dropbacks, ninth. That was before the trade. On June 2 the Rams acquired the reigning Defensive Player of the Year, Myles Garrett, from Cleveland for edge rusher Jared Verse and three draft picks. Stafford is back after leading the league with 4,707 passing yards and 46 touchdown passes and winning the first MVP of his career.

So why did the panel stop at 38.5, and why does that number look so different this morning than it did on Wednesday?

"The Rams pair the division's best 2025 two-sided efficiency profile with its easiest 2026 schedule and its biggest single addition, while the champion's defense-driven 14-3 sheds key personnel." — Claude Fable

The panel's discount was two dated facts. Garrett had missed most of August with knee swelling, and Stafford is 38, the oldest quarterback in the division by five years. Yesterday I wrote that the first of those had resolved in the Rams' favor: Garrett was cleared, carried no designation, and would play in Melbourne. He did play. He recorded zero tackles, and afterward he said the knee has him at less than full health: "This was the worst version of myself that I've put out there, and I've got to be better." Availability and health turned out to be different questions, and the panel's three-to-five-point concern is back on the ledger in a new form. The second fact aged one game: the league's most efficient offense converted 2 of 9 third downs and was held to 290 yards by a defense that ranked 24th last year, and Stafford's own summary was two good drives.

Here is the callback the tape earns. Yesterday morning the Rams had 55.5 cents and the panel had 38.5, and I wrote that the gap was an argument about August, not a signal about the morning. The market has now closed that gap to half a point, but it did not close it by rereading the August evidence; it closed it by watching one game. That is the difference between the panel and the market in one number. The panel priced regression from a first-and-second-ranked offense as a base rate. The market priced it only after seeing it, and then priced all of it at once. Kalshi's Rams win-total ladder tells the same story in a second market: the 13-or-more-wins contract traded at 44 cents before Melbourne and is 24 bid, 27 ask this morning; 12 or more went from 58 to 46 bid, 53 ask. One loss took a 13-win season from 44 cents to about one in four.

And here is the counterweight, because a page that only records the panic is not a record. The same exchange that cut the Rams to 38 in the division still has them at 14 bid, 15 ask to win Super Bowl LXI, the most expensive team on that entire board, ahead of Buffalo at 8.5. Their NFC championship contract is 19.5. The title markets moved on Melbourne too, but by less: the conference contract from a prior close of 25 to 19.5, the Super Bowl contract from 17 to 14.5, against 17.5 cents in the division.

Divide the conference price by the division price and you get about 51 percent for the Rams, 46 for Seattle and 30 for San Francisco. That ratio is not a true conditional, since a wild-card route to the NFC title counts in the numerator too, and it inflates differently for each team. But the Rams' is the one above one half, and it says the division board and the title board disagree about them. In this morning's column I said which one I trust; on this page the point is narrower. The panel's 38.5 was built on regression and age. The market's 38 was built on a 20-point loss. They are the same number for different reasons, and only one set of reasons will still be true on Sunday.

Seattle Seahawks: The Champion Is Priced Third, And Bought Anyway

Seattle is the team that did not play on Thursday and got bought while the other two did, and its price is the second-closest on the board to the panel's.

The champion's defense was not merely good. Seattle allowed -0.111 EPA per play, the best mark in football. It allowed the lowest rushing success rate in the league at 35.7 percent and the lowest rush EPA per attempt at -0.207. It gave up 292 points, fewest in the NFL. Mike Macdonald calls that defense himself and returns to do it again, and on Wednesday it intercepted Drake Maye three times and sacked him three times in a 10-point night.

The offense is where the caution lived, and the season's first week rewrote which part of it to worry about. Seattle finished 12th in EPA per play and 23rd in rushing success rate, a run game that was already below average before Super Bowl LX MVP Kenneth Walker III left for Kansas City. The backfield question answered itself against New England: first-round pick Jadarian Price carried 10 times for 52 yards and George Holani eight for 29. The quarterback question opened in its place and, as of Thursday, has a shape: Darnold's hip is intact, the injury is muscular, he is expected to miss Arizona on September 20, and Drew Lock runs a new system under new offensive coordinator Brian Fleury until he returns. On defense, Boye Mafe, Tariq Woolen and Coby Bryant all left, though Seattle agreed to a one-year deal with cornerback Trevon Diggs on August 19.

Against that sits a base rate the panel takes seriously. Across the 24 seasons since 2002, the defending NFC West champion has repeated 8 times in 23 chances, about 35 percent. Seattle owns 10 of those 24 titles, more than any other club in the division.

"Seattle's two-game cushion plus the #1 defense its head coach calls outweighs the Rams' better efficiency profile carried by a 39-year-old MVP." — Claude Opus

[Editor's note: ESPN's roster record gives Stafford's date of birth as February 7, 1988, so he is 38 for the whole of a regular season that ends January 10, 2027, and turns 39 four weeks later. The age argument holds; the number in that sentence runs a year ahead of it.]

What this edition adds is the tape. The MRI news moved nothing, as the section above shows, and then somebody bought 1,184 contracts at 34 at 11:19 p.m., during a game Seattle was not playing, as the Rams' price was collapsing. It settled at 31 bid, 32 ask with 430 contracts resting on the bid, the deepest quote on the board. The market's 31.5 and the panel's 32.5 are a point apart, and the direction of the week's moves is easy to read: down ten cents on the injury, nothing on the scan, up three when its chief rival lost by 20. Seattle plays Arizona twice, starting September 20 in Arizona with Drew Lock, and Kalshi prices that game at 72 bid, 74 ask; its head coach still calls the defense that just held Drake Maye to 10 points. Third place on this board is not the same as third place in the race, and the panel's one-point gap is the market agreeing.

San Francisco 49ers: The Record That Lied, And The Defense That Showed Up

San Francisco is where the panel and the market now disagree most, and for once the market is the optimist: 35.5 cents against a 24.5 percent blend, 11 points. In August the two sides agreed that the 49ers' record had lied; both had them under 25.

The 49ers finished 12-5, identical to the Rams. Their point differential was +66 against the Rams' +172. Underneath that, the split is starker than the records suggest: San Francisco's offense was sixth in EPA per play and third in success rate. Its defense was 24th in EPA allowed, 29th in success rate allowed, and 31st in rushing success rate allowed. Most striking, it sacked the quarterback on 3.2 percent of opponent dropbacks, dead last in the NFL, and finished with 20 team sacks, also last.

"My biggest break with a naive record ranking is San Francisco: 12-5 on +66 with a #24 EPA defense, #29 success rate allowed and a dead-last sack rate is not reproducible as-is." — Kimi

The repair case was the reason the panel sat above the price in August, and Melbourne was the first evidence for it. Nick Bosa, back from the torn ACL that cost him 14 games, made two tackles for loss. Fred Warner, back from the broken and dislocated ankle that cost him 11, made 11 tackles, and Tyler Higbee fumbled with Keion White recovering. Osa Odighizuwa hit Stafford four times and the defense hit him eight times in all by ESPN's box score, Renardo Green intercepted him, and the unit stopped a fourth-down sneak from its own 1. Raheem Morris, the fifth defensive coordinator in five seasons and a former Rams coordinator himself, called it. Mike Evans, signed to a three-year, $42 million contract to be Purdy's first receiver, caught six passes and a touchdown.

One number for the August ledger: the sack count was zero. Eight hits, two tackles for loss, an interception, a fumble recovery, a goal-line stand, and no sacks in 25 Stafford dropbacks. The panel's question about this defense was its sack rate through Week 4, and data point one says the pressure came back before the sacks did.

That is also why the 49ers' 15 cents deserve the scrutiny the Rams' 17.5 are getting. The market did not just price a win; it priced the removal of a doubt, that Bosa and Warner are the players they were before the injuries. That may be right. It was also settled on one night, against an opponent that landed in Australia less than two days before kickoff, and the price now contains all of it: no seat on the panel is within ten points of 35.5. The 49ers' ratio of conference price to division price is about 30 percent, the lowest on the board, and a low ratio means the division price is rich compared with the title price: the market will pay 35.5 for San Francisco to win the West and only 10.5 for it to win the conference. That is the market saying there is no discount left in the division number. San Francisco closed as a 3.5-point underdog at DraftKings on Thursday and won by 20; the live odds screen carries every book's number on each week's games, so you can shop the line rather than take the first one posted.

The Schedule Nobody Puts On The Board

Strength-of-schedule tables put all four of these slates within a few points of .500 by opponents' 2025 win percentage, and by the harder measure, opponents' 2025 net EPA per play, the Rams drew the easiest of the four and Arizona the toughest. The calendar is where the real differences are, and three of them are unusual enough to matter.

The division opened in Australia, and it cost the favorite a home game. Week 1 was San Francisco at Los Angeles at the Melbourne Cricket Ground, the NFL's first regular-season game in Melbourne. The Rams were the designated home team, which leaves them eight home dates at SoFi Stadium this season rather than nine, and the game is now a division loss on their ledger and a division win on San Francisco's. The head-to-head tiebreaker between these two is San Francisco's to lose until the return game in Santa Clara on Sunday, December 13.

San Francisco travels again. The 49ers are also the designated home team for a Week 11 game against Minnesota at Estadio Banorte in Mexico City on November 22, more than 7,000 feet above sea level. That is two international trips in one season, one of them a surrendered home date, and it is a burden neither Seattle nor Arizona carries at all.

The title can be decided on Christmas and then again in Week 18. Los Angeles visits Seattle on Friday, December 25 at Lumen Field, arriving on five days' rest after a Sunday game while Seattle has six after a Saturday one. Then both Week 18 games are divisional, on January 10, 2027: Seattle at Los Angeles, and San Francisco at Arizona. If the tiebreaker decides this division, the Rams hold the last game and the home field for it, and after Thursday they may need it.

One more piece of calendar trivia says something about how the league read this division in the spring. Arizona was scheduled into zero standalone national windows, no Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Monday or Sunday-night games at all, while the Rams and Seahawks drew six apiece.

Dark Horses The Panel Won't Dismiss

Arizona is the panel's largest proportional disagreement on the board, and Thursday did nothing to shrink it. The contract has no bid this morning: zero on one side, a penny on the other, with 5,189 contracts offered at that penny, 666 traded in the last 24 hours, and about 107,500 contracts of open interest that somebody is still holding. Set that against a panel median of 4 percent, and Claude Fable's 5, and the shape is unusual: sellers offering size at one cent on a team six models priced at four or five, in a division that just showed how fast a favorite can lose 17.5 cents.

Nobody is calling Arizona good. It went 3-14 at -133 and 0-6 in the division, with the league's worst success rate allowed on defense at 48.7 percent, and it is rebuilding under a first-time head coach in Mike LaFleur with Jacoby Brissett starting and Notre Dame running back Jeremiyah Love, the third pick of the draft, behind him. It also drew the toughest slate of the four by opponents' 2025 net EPA. The panel's number is not a prediction that Arizona wins. It is what six models think a 3-14 team is worth when the three teams above it are one quarterback injury away from a different division and it plays them six times, and the first of those six is Seattle, at Arizona, on September 20, with Drew Lock expected to start.

Where The Panel Changed Its Mind

Each model read the other five boards anonymously and could revise. Five of the six moved a number by at least three points, and the reasoning is more interesting than the movement.

The largest single revision was Gemini's, which had been the most bearish seat on Seattle and raised the champion by 11 points while cutting San Francisco by eight:

"Mike Macdonald calling the league's #1 EPA defense is the division's most reliable asset and will keep them in every game. […] San Francisco's 12-5 record was the most inflated on the card, driven by a modest +66 point differential and a defense that ranked 24th in EPA and dead last in sack rate." — Gemini, after raising Seattle from 24 to 35

Moving the other way, Claude Fable had Seattle first in the opening round and flipped to the Rams:

"Seattle's 14-3 and +191 look dominant, but the card's own history says the defending champ repeats just 35% of the time (8 of 23), and the underlying shape argues regression: the title was defense-driven (#1 EPA/play allowed, #1 rush defense) around a #12 offense." — Claude Fable, after cutting Seattle from 39 to 32

And one seat moved against the group. Claude Opus raised Seattle from 34 to 38 while most of the panel was consolidating behind the Rams, and it made a structural argument nobody else engaged:

"Seattle finished 14-3 (+191) and the Rams 12-5 (+172): the differentials say these are the same team, which is precisely why the standings gap matters — Los Angeles does not merely need to be a bit better, it needs to be two wins better or win the tiebreakers." — Claude Opus

ChatGPT barely moved at all: the Rams down a point, Arizona and San Francisco up half a point each, Seattle unchanged. That is its own kind of answer, the seat that read five other boards and found nothing in them it had not already priced. Note what none of the six did: nobody raised the 49ers above 25, and the only seat that moved them by more than a point, Gemini, moved them down. The revision round argued about the top two, which is exactly where the market has now put its money.

The August Questions, Scored After Two Games

In August this page listed the checkable events that would move the panel's numbers. Two games in, here is where each stands.

• Myles Garrett's Knee Before Week 1. Resolved for availability, reopened for form. He played in Melbourne without a designation and recorded zero tackles, then said the knee has him below full health. The panel had said the knee was worth three to five points to the Rams. The market paid seven and a half on Wednesday night and took back 17.5 on Thursday night, and neither move was about Garrett.
• Any Stafford Absence In September. No injury. Bennett took the final snaps of a decided game. The room behind Stafford is unchanged: Bennett and two rookies.
• Seattle's Backfield By The September Opener. Answered on the field. Price led the backfield with 10 carries at 5.2 yards apiece, Holani took the rest, and the run game the panel worried about was not the reason Seattle scored 13.
• San Francisco's Sack Rate Through Week 4. Data point one: zero sacks on 25 Stafford dropbacks, eight quarterback hits, one interception, one fumble recovery. The floor to beat is last year's 3.2 percent, and the first game did not beat it by the panel's measure while beating it by every other.
• Sam Darnold's MRI. Resolved, on the good branch: intact hip, muscular injury, out for Week 2, back "sooner rather than later" per the sources ESPN and NFL Network cited. Seattle's division price did not move on the news; its Week 2 game contract is 72/74, down from a prior close of 76.
• Melbourne. Resolved 27-7 the other way, and it moved this board more than the injury did.
• The Rams' Next Game. New. The market has priced a 20-point loss as if it were a verdict on the roster; Monday night, September 21, at home against the New York Giants is the first evidence either way, and the five-contract bid at 37 will not survive it in either direction.

Settlement Timeline

What	When
Week 1, San Francisco 27, Los Angeles 7, Melbourne Cricket Ground	Thursday, September 10, 2026 (final)
Seahawks At Cardinals, Week 2 (Drew Lock Expected To Start)	Sunday, September 20, 2026, 4:25 p.m. ET
Giants At Rams, Week 2	Monday, September 21, 2026, 8:15 p.m. ET
Rams At 49ers, Week 14, The Return Game	Sunday, December 13, 2026, 4:25 p.m. ET
Rams At Seahawks, Week 16, Christmas Day	Friday, December 25, 2026
Seahawks At Rams And 49ers At Cardinals, Week 18 Finale	Sunday, January 10, 2027
Contracts Close Early	Once a division champion is declared
Listed Expected Expiration	January 11, 2027

This page is re-scored when the story moves, and the panel's calls are graded in public when the market settles. Prices on this page are as of 6:03 a.m. ET on September 11, 2026; the panel's numbers are as of August 26, 2026, before the season began.

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The Bottom Line

The market and the panel agreed on the order of this division in August, disagreed about the daylight yesterday morning, and this morning agree on the favorite's number while disagreeing about who is second.

Kalshi separates the Rams and the 49ers by 2.5 cents and the 49ers and the Seahawks by four, a board that had 27 cents between first and second 24 hours ago. The panel's Rams number, 38.5, is now the market's Rams number, but I promised at the top to say what I think that is worth, and the answer is: less than the agreement suggests. The panel discounted the Rams for regression and a 38-year-old quarterback, arguments that were true before Melbourne and are still true. The market discounted them for a 20-point loss on a jet-lagged Thursday, and the same exchange still sells them as the most expensive Super Bowl ticket on the board. One of those two prices is wrong, and I would rather be on the side of the one that did not panic overnight, which is why the trading column this morning names the Rams at 39 as the number on this board most worth arguing about, and the 49ers at 36 as the one to be most careful with. That is a trader's read, and it can be wrong by Monday night.

In late August this page described the three teams at the top of this division as one quarterback injury away from a different division. Two games in, the market has priced the injury, priced the scan that softened it, and priced a division game that the favorite lost by 20. What it has not priced, because nobody can yet, is whether the Melbourne Rams are the real ones. The 2025 NFC West was the only division in the last 24 seasons to put three teams at .700 or better, and all three are still here, inside seven cents of each other. This page will say in January who read it right.

The same panel scored the NFC South on a board with the opposite shape: four teams nobody can separate, and a 6-11 club priced second.

Prices on this page are Kalshi's book. If you also trade on Polymarket, code OS4 gets new users a $50 trading bonus on a $10 deposit — affiliate link; terms as stated by Polymarket; 18+, availability varies by state.