Chicago's playoff qualifier contract went 61¢ → 17¢ → 46¢ inside ninety minutes on Sunday, and then did a smaller version of the same thing again on Monday morning. The steal was real and it is gone. At a 46¢ midpoint today we do not see an edge worth paying for, and the popular reason for buying the bounce — an easy remaining schedule — is backwards: Chicago's 15 remaining opponents average +1.04 PWR, and nine of them are rated above the Bears themselves. The disagreement we would actually chase on this board is Minnesota at 57¢ with a −2.0 power rating.
Caleb Williams went down scrambling with about eight and a half minutes left against Minnesota on Sunday, and got carted off. What happened next on Kalshi is the cleanest illustration we have seen this season of how a season-long contract behaves when news arrives faster than anyone can price it.
The tape
We pulled the hourly candles on Chicago's 2026-27 playoff qualifier contract rather than relying on the round numbers that circulated afterward. The market had been a rock at 61¢ all weekend — 61¢ Friday evening, 61¢ through Saturday, 61¢ at Sunday noon. Then:
| Hour (ET, Sun Sep 20) | Close | High | Low | Volume |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2–3 p.m. | 61¢ | 61¢ | 61¢ | 8 |
| 3–4 p.m. | 24¢ | 61¢ | 24¢ | 3,377 |
| 4–5 p.m. | 46¢ | 57¢ | 17¢ | 1,459 |
| 5–6 p.m. | 45¢ | 59¢ | 36¢ | 388 |
| 10–11 p.m. | 45¢ | 45¢ | 45¢ | 9 |
Two things in that table are worth sitting with.
The first is the 17¢ print. Most of the coverage of this move put the floor at 24¢, which is where the 3 p.m. hour closed. The actual low tick came in the following hour, after the close everyone quoted, and it was seven cents lower. If you had a resting order down there it got filled on a quarterback with a hamstring strain, on a 1-1 team, in September.
The second is the speed of the repair. That same 4–5 p.m. hour that printed 17¢ also printed 57¢ and closed at 46¢. The market did not take a day to reconsider. It took less than sixty minutes, on 1,459 contracts, and it was essentially done before the stadium emptied.
Then it happened again, smaller. Monday morning the contract sagged back to 32¢ on the practice-report vacuum, held that low through the 1 p.m. hour on a thousand-plus contracts, and snapped to 42¢ within the hour once head coach Ben Johnson called the injury week-to-week and declined to rule Williams out for the Monday nighter against Philadelphia. By Tuesday lunchtime it printed 49¢.
Where it stands now: 45¢ bid, 47¢ ask, a 46¢ midpoint and a two-cent spread, read at 1:08 p.m. ET on Tuesday, September 22. Verify before you act — curl -s -H 'User-Agent: PredictionMarketsPicks/1.0' https://api.elections.kalshi.com/trade-api/v2/markets/KXNFLPLAYOFF-27-CHI
The part we have to be honest about
The popular case for buying Chicago here goes: the injury is short, the schedule is manageable, the market overshot. The first clause is probably true. The third clause was true, at 17¢, for about ninety minutes.
The middle clause does not survive a look at the ratings.
We ran all 15 of Chicago's remaining opponents through our NFL power ratings, where PWR is points per game above an average team on a neutral field. An average opponent grades at 0.0. Chicago's remaining slate:
| Rating band | Opponents |
|---|---|
| Elite (+2.5 and up) | @ Seattle (+5.5, 1st), New England (+4.3, 2nd), @ Buffalo (+3.4, 4th), Jacksonville (+2.7, 5th) |
| Strong (+1.5 to +2.4) | @ Green Bay and Green Bay (+2.3, 6th), @ Detroit and Detroit (+1.9, 7th), Philadelphia (+1.9, 8th) |
| Middling (−1.0 to +1.0) | @ Atlanta (−0.4), Tampa Bay (−0.5) |
| Soft (below −1.0) | New Orleans (−1.8), NY Jets (−2.9), @ Miami (−3.0), @ Minnesota (−2.0) |
Average remaining opponent: +1.04 PWR. Median: +1.90. Nine of the 15 are rated above Chicago's own +1.4. Four of the league's top five teams are still on the card, three of them in a five-week stretch from Week 7 to Week 13, and the schedule does not hand them a soft landing while Williams heals — it hands them Philadelphia, the Jets, then Green Bay on the road.
That is not a manageable schedule. That is a slate that requires the Bears to be good, which is a different argument than the one being made.
The overreaction was real, the recovery already happened, and the schedule argument people are using to justify buying at 46¢ is the weakest leg of the case. A contract can be correctly repriced and still not be a buy.
The disagreement nobody is looking at
Here is what we found while checking the Chicago line — and it is the reason this article exists rather than a simple "we told you so" about the dip.
Put the NFC North playoff qualifier board next to our own power ratings:
| Team | Kalshi midpoint | PWR | League rank |
|---|---|---|---|
| Detroit | 62.5¢ | +1.9 | 7th |
| Minnesota | 57.0¢ | −2.0 | 26th |
| Green Bay | 47.5¢ | +2.3 | 6th |
| Chicago | 46.0¢ | +1.4 | 10th |
The Chicago line is the least interesting row in that table. Our ratings have the Bears 10th and the market has them fourth in their own division at 46¢ — close enough that the two views are arguing about a few cents.
Minnesota and Green Bay are not close. The market has the Vikings nearly ten cents above the Packers to qualify, while our board has Green Bay sixth in the league and Minnesota twenty-sixth — a four-plus point gap in PWR pointing the other way. Those two rows disagree with each other far more violently than anything the Caleb Williams news produced.
We are going to be disciplined about what that means. A power rating is not a playoff probability. PWR measures strength on a neutral field; a qualifier contract prices strength plus schedule, tiebreakers, conference math and fifteen weeks of injury variance. There is no honest conversion between the two, so we are not going to invent one and tell you Minnesota "should" be 30¢. What we will say is that a four-point ratings gap pointing opposite to a ten-cent price gap is the single loudest disagreement on this board, and it is where we would spend the next hour of work.
What we would actually do
Chicago at 46¢ — pass. Not a fade, a pass. The market found a reasonable number quickly and twice, the spread is two cents, and the schedule does not support paying up. If Williams practices in full and the contract is still in the 40s, that changes the conversation; if he misses multiple weeks and it trades back to the low 30s with Bagent going 1-2 into a soft Week 11, that is a price worth revisiting.
Minnesota at 57¢ — the work item. Go find out whether the market knows something our Week 2 ratings do not. That is a real possibility and we will say so plainly.
The structural lesson, which is the durable part. Twice in thirty-six hours this contract dislocated and repaired inside an hour. That is what a thin season-long market does when news lands, and it is the most reliably repeatable opportunity these exchanges offer. It rewards a resting order and preparation, not a reaction — by the time you have read the injury tweet and opened the app, the 17¢ is a 46¢.
Do the arithmetic before you size anything. Put your own number on Chicago reaching January against the live price in the Expected Value Calculator, and let the Kelly framework decide how small a four-month position should be. The power ratings update weekly and are where the schedule read above comes from.
The other side
Being fair to the case we just argued against: Williams was the second-most valuable rushing quarterback in the league through two weeks — 107 rushing yards and two scores on top of 407 passing yards — and a healthy return in Week 4 or 5 genuinely restores most of what the market marked down. Chicago is 1-1 with a home game against a New England team they can beat and a Jets game that reads like a free win. Our power ratings are a Week 2 board with two games of sample, blended against a preseason prior, and they were computed on September 16 — before the injury — so the +1.4 on Chicago is a healthy-Caleb number and should be read as such.
And if you think the market's Minnesota price is the accurate one and our 26th-place rating is the error, that is a coherent position. It is also, conveniently, a testable one. We will grade it here in December.
Verification notes. Kalshi prices read from the public markets and candlesticks endpoints for KXNFLPLAYOFF-27 on September 22, 2026 at 17:06–17:08 UTC; hourly candles cover September 18–22. Power ratings are the PredictionMarketsPicks Week 2 board, as-of September 16, 2026 — a stale read by our own freshness flag at publication, and pre-injury. Injury reporting via the Bears' Monday availability report. Prices move; the board is live and this article is not.
Trade responsibly.