Updated September 12, 2026 · by Sam Smith. Prices as of 6:06 AM ET on Saturday, September 12, 2026. Tua Tagovailoa is out of the Atlanta Falcons' Week 1 game at Pittsburgh with an oblique strain, Cooper Rush starts in his place, Michael Penix Jr. stays inactive, and no contract on Kalshi prices the question readers are asking: when Penix takes the job.
The Quick Answer
Tua Tagovailoa will not start the Atlanta Falcons' NFL season opener at Pittsburgh on Sunday, September 13. He strained an oblique throwing a pass at Thursday's practice, the team ruled him out on Friday afternoon, and head coach Kevin Stefanski called him week-to-week. Cooper Rush starts against the Steelers, undrafted rookie Jack Strand is the backup, and Michael Penix Jr. stays inactive while he finishes rehabbing last November's ACL surgery. The exchange had already moved on: Kalshi's contract on the Falcons' Week 1 starting quarterback settled as a Yes on Tagovailoa on Wednesday evening, two days before he was ruled out, because the rule pays on the depth chart, not the snap. The one contract that ever stood in for his job security, 1,500 or more passing yards this season, printed 10 cents at 1:24 p.m. Friday, down from the 71 cents this page was built on. And a contract on his passing yards in a game he will not play is still quoting 68 cents on 44,709 open contracts.
The question readers are typing, when Penix takes the job, has no market. What Kalshi lists is a game line: the Steelers went from 68 cents on Friday morning to 70 bid, 71 ask by Friday night, and the spread ladder's coin flip moved from three and a half to five and a half. The settled contract, the 10-cent print, the contract that should not still be trading, and the number Rush moved are all below, in that order.
Paid Before He Sat
Kalshi's Week 1 starting-quarterback market for Atlanta closed early at 5:37 p.m. Eastern on Wednesday, September 9, under its depth-chart clause, and it settled at 6:07 p.m. the same evening: Yes on Tagovailoa, No on Penix, Rush, Strand and Trevor Siemian. The rules are the reason it could. "Position designation is determined by the official depth chart published by the team for the specified week," the contract reads, and then: "If the player is injured but still officially listed at the position, the market resolves to Yes." The listing paid, and the listing was published the evening before Tagovailoa grabbed at his back on the practice field.
Four days ago, our board on this market put it in one sentence: the rule protects the listing, not the player. That was written as a caution for anyone holding the 99-cent contract into a week of practice. It turned out to be the whole story. The contract traded 133,537 contracts of face value in its life. It carried 62,905 open at the close, and every Yes holder collected a dollar for a quarterback who will spend Sunday on the sideline. Recall the 8,347-contract print on Monday, September 7, the largest of that day, where a holder sold at 99 cents rather than wait: that seller gave up a cent and two days, and would have been paid in full on Wednesday. The market's answer to "who starts for Atlanta in Week 1" is Tagovailoa, settled and paid. The field's answer is Rush. Both are correct, and that gap is what the rest of this page is about.
Two Clocks On Friday
Run the exchange's clock next to the news clock and the week reads differently than the wires tell it. Wednesday, 5:37 p.m.: the depth chart closes the starter market. Wednesday, 6:07 p.m.: the exchange pays Tagovailoa's holders. Thursday, practice: he throws a pass and sits down on the grass. Thursday, 3:40 p.m.: one contract of the 1,500-yard proxy prints at 12 cents, the first trade on it in three days. Friday, 1:24:52 p.m.: 221 contracts of the same proxy sell at 11 and 10 cents. Friday, 1:39 p.m.: the team posts the game report that rules him out. Friday, 1:57 p.m.: ESPN's story is up. The 221-contract seller was a quarter-hour ahead of the team's post, and I cannot tell you whether that was a beat reporter's tweet or a guess; I can tell you the tape had already decided before the paperwork.
The injury itself happened in the part of Thursday's practice reporters are allowed to watch. Tagovailoa threw a pass in a drill, reached for his back and sat down on the grass, per ESPN. The team listed him as limited with an oblique injury on Thursday's report, Rush took every first-team rep at Thursday's practice, and Rush's own account of the afternoon, per NFL.com, was as flat as a backup's has to be: "I'm not sure what happened. It's Thursday practice. Practice has to go on, and so you're up next. We'll see what happens."
Friday answered him. The Falcons posted their game report at 1:39 p.m. Eastern with Tagovailoa ruled out, on atlantafalcons.com, and Stefanski told reporters he was week-to-week and that the strain is unrelated to the back issue he dealt with at the start of training camp, per ESPN's story at 1:57 p.m. "Disappointed for him, obviously," Stefanski said. "He's a very competitive person, so disappointed." On Rush, he settled for the line every coach uses: "That's the life of a backup quarterback." On Penix, he gave the sentence that matters most for this page: "No. Mike will be ready when he's ready."
Rush is 32 and was signed by Atlanta before training camp. He has started 16 NFL games with a 9-7 record in them, per ESPN. His career line is 3,766 yards with 20 touchdowns and 14 interceptions. Last season, in Baltimore, he threw for 303 yards, no touchdowns and four interceptions. Strand, the undrafted rookie, is the backup. Penix was a full participant on Friday's report with the knee still listed, and is out anyway; the team's game report shows both quarterbacks on the same line under "Out." Neither ESPN's account nor the team's report carries a word from Stefanski on whether the job is Tagovailoa's when he is healthy. Nobody has asked the question in a way that got an answer, and, as the next section shows, nobody has priced it either.
The Proxy Printed 10 Cents
When this page was written on Monday, there was no contract on Tagovailoa's job, so it read the closest thing Kalshi listed: "Tua Tagovailoa records 1500+ passing yards" in the 2026-27 regular season, on the Atlanta team-specials board, at 71 cents. The logic was that 1,500 yards is about 88 a game across 17, a bar any quarterback clears by simply keeping the starts, so the No side was really a price on him stopping, by benching, trade or injury.
The contract has printed in three sessions since. At 1:24 p.m. Monday, 169 contracts bought at 71 cents, the trade that confirmed the price this page quoted. At 3:40 p.m. Thursday, after he left practice, a single contract at 12 cents. And at 1:24:52 p.m. Friday, a quarter-hour before the team's game report went up, 221 contracts sold in three prints at 11 and 10 cents. There is the whole record of the market's reaction to the injury: one contract on Thursday, 221 on Friday, about $22 of premium changing hands on the second day. The quote now is 10 cents bid, 74 cents offered. A spread that wide, on a contract with 1,512 open, is two people who disagree by a factor of seven and no one willing to stand between them.
Read the arithmetic anyway, because it says what the 10 cents is about. If Tagovailoa misses two games, he needs 100 yards a start over the remaining 15 to clear 1,500. If he misses four, it is 115 over 13. Neither is a hard bar for a starter. A 10-cent last print is not a bet that his arm produces the yards slowly. It is the one piece of tape on this exchange that says the crowd, or the small portion of it that showed up Friday, has cut the odds that he gets the starts back, from seven in ten on Monday to one in ten on the last print. I would not build a position on a print that thin, and I am not telling you the job is gone. I am telling you that when the yardage contract this page leaned on was asked to react to a one-week absence, its answer was 10 cents, and nobody has bid it higher since.
Kalshi is a CFTC-regulated event-contract exchange whose sports contracts are in active federal litigation (on August 28, 2026 the Ninth Circuit ruled Nevada can regulate them as sports bets); it requires users to be 18+ under its own platform policy, and availability varies by state as of September 2026. These are market prices and model estimates, not predictions of fact and not financial advice.
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The Contract That Should Not Still Be Trading
Here is the part of the exchange I cannot explain to you, and I will not pretend to. Kalshi's game-props board for Sunday still lists "Tua Tagovailoa: 150+" passing yards against Pittsburgh, and at the time of this read it quotes 68 cents bid, 75 offered, with 44,709 contracts open and 44,095 traded in the last 24 hours. That is more 24-hour volume than the game's 3.5-point spread rung, and it is on a player the team has ruled out.
The market's text explains some of it. "If Tua Tagovailoa is active but never takes a snap, the market settles to the fair market price before game start," the rule says, and once he takes a snap it settles on the yards. Read that carefully: it covers a quarterback who dresses and does not play. It does not, in the words on the contract, say what happens to a quarterback who is inactive, which is what Tagovailoa will be. Whether the exchange treats "out" the way it treats "active, no snap," and settles the contract at a pre-game fair value rather than a zero, is a question for Kalshi's rulebook and its market operations, not for a price. I do not know the answer, and I would not hold a position in either direction on a rule I cannot quote.
The tape says the crowd has an opinion, and it is not zero. Friday's 1 p.m. hour, the hour the news landed, printed 84 trades and 6,371 contracts. The range ran from 76 cents down to 40, and the 40-cent bottom of that hour was the one price that treated a ruled-out quarterback's yardage contract as nearly worthless. It did not hold. In the 7 p.m. hour on Friday, 25,467 contracts changed hands between 64 and 66 cents, most of it inside two minutes around 7:20. The largest was a single 13,513-contract print at 65 cents with the aggressor on the No side, which on Kalshi's tape means the aggressor took No at 35 cents and the order it hit was a resting bid of 65 cents for Yes. Whether that aggressor was closing a Yes position or opening a No one, the tape does not say. What it does say is that somebody had 13,513 contracts of Yes bid at 65 cents on a quarterback who will not throw a pass, and got filled. You do not bid 65 cents for a contract you expect to settle at zero, which reads to me like a position on the settlement mechanism rather than on Tagovailoa, though the tape cannot confirm it. It is the largest print on this contract since the news. Rush's own passing-yards ladder took its first trade that afternoon. His 175-or-more rung quotes 55 bid, 56 ask, after a 462-contract buy at 55 at 3:38 p.m., and 200 or more sits at 36/37. For comparison, Aaron Rodgers's 200-or-more rung for the Steelers is 56/59. The exchange thinks Rush throws for less than Rodgers, and it was not asked to think about Tagovailoa's Sunday at all, because it had already paid him.
The Board: Saturday Morning Against The Last Quote Before The Ruling
One table, every Falcons contract this page reads, with Saturday morning's bid and ask against the last reference price before Friday's ruling: this site's September 7 or September 8 board where we printed one, the exchange's Friday-morning quote where we did not. The starter contract is settled, the yardage proxy is a last print rather than a quote, and the game rows are the only ones with a real two-sided market. Volume and open interest are in contracts of one dollar face value, the way the exchange displays them.
| Contract | Bid | Ask | Before the ruling | Change |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Week 1 Starter, Kalshi's starting-QB Market: Tua | Settled Yes | paid in full | 99¢ bid on Sept 7 | paid $1 on Sept 9 |
| Season 1,500+ Passing Yards: Tua | 10¢ (last print 10¢) | 74¢ | 71¢ on Sept 7 | −61 on the last print |
| Sunday 150+ Passing Yards: Tagovailoa | 68¢ | 75¢ | 73¢ early Friday | −5, on a ruled-out player |
| Season 3,000+ Passing Yards: Penix | 18¢ | 29¢ | 27¢ on a 750-lot, Sept 7 | −9, no trade since Sept 9 |
| Sunday 175+ Passing Yards: Rush | 55¢ | 56¢ | first print Friday | new |
| Sunday Moneyline: Steelers | 70¢ | 71¢ | 62 / 63 on Sept 8 | +8 |
| Steelers By Over 5.5: Spread | 52¢ | 53¢ | 48 / 49 was the 3.5 rung on Sept 8 | the middle moved two points |
| Sunday Total, Over 41.5: Points | 46¢ | 47¢ | 50 / 51 on Sept 8 | −4 |
| Week 2 Moneyline Vs Carolina: Falcons | 51¢ | 52¢ | 52 / 53 on Sept 8 | −1 |
The row I keep coming back to is Penix's. His 3,000-or-more passing yards contract, the only season-long number on the exchange that says anything about him, quotes 18 bid, 29 offered and has not printed since Wednesday evening, when 181 contracts went at 18 cents with the aggressor on the No side. It did not trade Thursday when Tagovailoa left practice and it did not trade Friday when he was ruled out. Three thousand yards in a season that starts with him inactive is roughly 12 or 13 starts at 240 a game, so the contract is, in effect, a market on whether he has the job by the middle of October. The news that ought to have moved it was worth exactly nothing to it. His 3,500 rung is 0 bid, 7 offered; 4,000 is 0 bid, 12 offered. Nobody is buying a Penix season, and nobody was asked to on Friday, because the injury changed who plays Sunday and said nothing about who plays in November.
What Rush Did To The Number
The game line is the one market on this page that has real depth, and its Friday reads like a market that heard the news at lunch and decided by dinner.
Kalshi's Steelers-to-win contract opened Friday at 68 cents and traded 68 and 69 overnight, then 67 and 68 from 6 a.m. to noon Eastern. The 1 p.m. hour, the hour of the game report, turned over 15,014 contracts without leaving 68 and 69. The size came later. At 5:18 p.m. a single 13,852-contract buy printed at 70 cents, the largest trade on the contract since Friday began, and at 7:28 p.m. a 6,849-contract buy went through at 71. From that hour on, the quote has been 70 bid, 71 ask, and it was still there at this morning's read, with 352,105 contracts open on the Steelers side. Across Friday and the overnight, 132,593 Steelers contracts traded. The move is eight cents on the ask, 63 on Tuesday to 71 now, and three of them came after the news: the 70 handle first traded in the 4 p.m. hour, the 13,852-contract buy at 5:18 p.m. reinforced it, and the 6,849-contract buy at 7:28 p.m. put the last cent on.
The spread ladder tells the same story with more precision. On Tuesday the coin flip sat on "Pittsburgh wins by over 3.5 points" at 48/49, the number 27 sportsbooks had posted, per this site's Tuesday board. At this morning's read the coin flip lives at "over 5.5 points," 52 bid, 53 ask, on 81,188 contracts in 24 hours and 83,690 open, the busiest spread rung on the board by a factor of two; the 3.5 rung is now 57/58 and the 4.5 rung 54/56. The exchange's middle for this game moved two points on a quarterback change from Tagovailoa to Rush, which is about what a book charges for the gap between the quarterback the team named and a 32-year-old with 16 career starts. The total went the other way, as it should: over 41.5 quotes 46/47, down from 50/51 on Tuesday, and over 40.5 is 51/52, so the exchange's number is roughly 41 now, against the 41.5 to 42.5 the sportsbooks were posting on Tuesday's board.
The sportsbooks moved further than the exchange did and landed in the same place. On the OddsShopper live NFL odds screen at 6:10 a.m., DraftKings has the Steelers at -265, about 73 percent implied with the vig in, against the -185, about 65 percent, it posted on Tuesday. Kalshi's 70/71 is the same number without the vig. Pinnacle's -268 on Pittsburgh and the +230 top of market on Atlanta at FanDuel, about 30 percent, bracket the exchange's 29/30 within a cent; the exchange's 30-cent ask sits at the cheap edge of the books' Atlanta band. Two venues, two tapes, one read on Rush: a two-point spread move and eight cents on the winner.
Shopping the opener? The free NFL expert picks page has the Week 1 cards, and our guide to how to bet NFL on Kalshi covers why a cent is a percent and why a 64-cent spread, like the one on the 1,500-yard contract above, is a reason to walk away, not a bargain.
When Does Penix Take The Job?
Plainly: no market prices it, and Friday did not create one. Kalshi's starting-quarterback series is a Week 1 series; as of this read it lists no Week 2 event for Atlanta, no depth-chart contract on the Falcons for any later week, and nothing on Penix's return. The Week 2 game against Carolina at Atlanta on September 20 quotes the Falcons at 51/52, a cent lower than Tuesday, and that is a price on a game with whoever starts it. The three contracts on this page that touch the question, the 10-cent yardage proxy, the untraded Penix 18/29, and the settled starter contract, are a last print, a stale quote and a paid ticket. None of them is a market.
The reason is structural. A "Penix starts Week 2" contract would resolve the way the Week 1 one did, on the official depth chart, and the Week 1 chart came out on a Wednesday, which puts the next one on or about September 16. Between now and then the only inputs are a coach who said "Mike will be ready when he's ready," a player who told reporters this week, per NFL.com, that he is very close to ready but not quite there, and a starter who is week-to-week with an injury the coach declined to classify. None of it is enough for the exchange to list on, and it would not be enough for anyone to price if it did. On Tuesday this site said the first practice report that shows Penix taking first-team reps is the thing that moves a Penix market, and that is still true, with one amendment: the first-team reps for the next several days belong to Rush, and a backup who wins at Pittsburgh as a five-and-a-half-point underdog on the exchange's ladder would make the Wednesday chart a three-way question the market has never had to price.
That is the thing a one-week absence does, and the reason the intent of this page changed between Monday and Friday. A quarterback does not lose a job on an oblique strain. He loses it when the depth chart that pays the Yes holders is published with someone else's name on the top line, and the only way that happens is a Sunday like this one going well for the man who replaced him. The exchange paid Tagovailoa on Wednesday for a game he will watch. The next depth chart is due in four days, and this page will print the first contract that names the job.
More on this: Falcons Week 1 Starting QB Odds: Tua Or Penix? · Falcons vs Steelers Kalshi Picks: Atlanta Named Its Quarterback · Falcons vs Steelers Odds: The Two A.M. Steelers Buyer · Kalshi Liquidity: Which Sports Markets Are Deep Enough To Trade · How To Bet NFL On Kalshi
About The Numbers
Every price on this page is a Kalshi quote or trade as of September 12, 2026, at 6:06 a.m. Eastern, except where a date is given; the starter contract's settlement time, the 1,500-yard prints, the 150-yard tape and the Steelers tape come from the exchange's trade history, and the sportsbook prices come from the OddsShopper live odds screen at 6:10 a.m. A cent is a percent: 70 cents bid on the Steelers means the crowd will pay 70 cents for a contract that settles at a dollar if Pittsburgh wins. "Bid / ask" is the best price a buyer will pay and the lowest a seller will take; where the two are far apart, as on the 1,500-yard contract, the last print is quoted separately because the quote itself is not a price. The injury facts come from the Falcons' September 11 game report, ESPN's September 10 and 11 stories, NFL.com's September 10 report and Sports Illustrated's September 11 story, linked above; the Tuesday sportsbook numbers come from this site's September 8 board on the starter market.
