Fantasy Defense Rankings 2026: The D/ST1 Odds Board, Priced Blind

Kalshi's fantasy D/ST board is the last open seat in the rank-list family: 32 contracts, one per NFL team defense, settling on which unit finishes as the No. 1 scoring D/ST in ESPN PPR fantasy scoring for the 2026 regular season. The market's answer is a three-way tie: Houston, Seattle and the Los Angeles Rams all quote 20.5-cent midpoints. We handed the whole board to our eight-model AI panel, price-blind, with every team's verified 2025 sacks, interceptions, takeaways and defensive touchdowns fetched the same morning, then let each seat read the others' anonymized reasoning and revise. The panel's answer disagrees with all three co-favorites at once, and its argument comes down to one distinction: which defensive stats persist year over year, and which ones are luck wearing a jersey.

The Quick Answer

Eight price-blind AI models make Denver the 2026 fantasy D/ST1 favorite at a 12.9% blend, almost exactly its 12-cent price, on the stickiest stat on the card: 68 sacks, 11 clear of any other defense. The market's three 20.5-cent co-favorites all get faded hard: Houston to 9.3%, the Rams to 7.1%, and Seattle, whose 2025 finish leaned on seven defensive touchdowns, all the way to 6.1%. The panel's value calls run the other way: the Chargers at 7.4% against 5.5 cents on a zero-defensive-TD line begging to regress upward, and Detroit at 5.8% against 2.5 cents. And with 32 teams in a variance-heavy race, the panel parks about 27% on the 19 thin-book defenses the market barely prices. The full board, every seat's number, and what would change the panel's mind are below.

New to event markets? How to bet NFL on Kalshi covers the mechanics; this page is the fantasy-defense layer.

The Market

Kalshi's event (KXRANKLISTFFDST-27) settles on one rule, quoted from the contracts: "If [team] D/ST is the #1 scoring D/ST on ESPN Fantasy Football PPR D/ST Rankings in the 2026-2027 regular season, then the market resolves to Yes," scored on "the totals for the entirety of the NFL regular season." A tie splits the settlement: tied contracts "resolve to $1/(the number of candidates tied), rounded down." Listed expiration is February 1, 2027. One honesty note before any price below: this is the rank-list family's thinnest board, about 3,200 contracts traded across all 32 markets, with Houston's 907 the largest single book and quotes as wide as 18-bid, 23-ask. Prices here are opinions with wide error bars, which is precisely what makes a price-blind second opinion useful. Two timestamps: panel verdicts were generated the afternoon of August 3, 2026, price-blind; prices were fetched from the exchange at 14:59 UTC the same day and refresh on our standard market-pulse cycle.

What The Fetched Record Says

The card behind the panel carried each defense's 2025 regular-season line, verified against ESPN the same morning: sacks, interceptions, takeaways and defensive touchdowns, plus each team's final record. The facts that did the heavy lifting: Denver posted 68 sacks, the card's runaway outlier, with only 14 takeaways and 2 defensive touchdowns. Houston's line was the most balanced elite profile, 47 sacks, 29 takeaways, 4 touchdowns. Seattle paired a real floor (47 sacks, 25 takeaways) with 7 defensive touchdowns, the most volatile number on the card. The Chargers put up 45 sacks and 19 interceptions with zero defensive touchdowns, and New England scored 6 defensive touchdowns on just 35 sacks. Two bucket teams carried loud lines of their own: Atlanta's 57 sacks were second in football, and Chicago led the league with 33 takeaways. The card also carried one settled player-movement fact: Cleveland's Myles Garrett was traded this offseason, per the exchange's own finalized contract.

How The Panel Read It

All eight seats independently landed on the same mechanism in round one: sack volume persists, splash plays regress.

"I heavily weighted elite, sticky sack volume while fading unsustainable touchdown rates, identifying Denver as the safest baseline and the Chargers as the strongest positive regression candidate." (Gemini 3.1 Pro)

"I aggressively fade Seattle (7 defensive TDs) and New England (6 TDs on just 35 sacks) because defensive touchdowns are the least repeatable component and the public will anchor on last year's gaudy totals." (DeepSeek V4)

The same logic cuts both ways on Denver: 68 sacks with only 14 takeaways reads as an engine that has not yet converted to splash plays, which is why every seat priced Denver's upside rather than its 2025 fantasy finish.

Where The Panel Changed Its Mind

Each seat then read the other seven's anonymized reasoning and could revise. Cross-model disagreement fell from 1.21 to 0.53 points per outcome, and the movement was evidence-shaped. The round's biggest single move was Gemini doubling Houston from 5% to 10% after crediting the field's balance argument. Its most consequential arc belonged to Claude Sonnet, the round-one low seat on Denver at 6.6%, which came back at 11.5 after building the math out:

"I built a simple regression model: keep ~65% of each team's 2025 sacks (sticky), but regress takeaways ~65% and defensive TDs ~75% toward league mean (volatile, low year-over-year persistence), then convert to ESPN PPR points." (Claude Sonnet, raising Denver 6.6% to 11.5%)

Not every seat moved toward the middle, though. While the field's Denver numbers rose, Claude Opus cut its own from 12.5 to 11 and stayed below the blend, on a counter-argument the rest of the panel had skipped:

"A 68-sack season is itself an outlier component that regresses (toward mid-50s) at roughly the same magnitude as the takeaway rebound gains." (Claude Opus, staying below the consensus on Denver)

And the Seattle fade found real resistance: Sonnet raised Seattle from 7.8% to 9.5% against the panel's direction, and Kimi kept a floor under its number, arguing "7 defensive TDs will regress, but a 47-sack, 25-takeaway floor is elite even stripped of TD luck." The blend's 6.1% on Seattle is an average of an honest argument, not a consensus.

Denver Broncos: The Panel's Favorite At The Market's Fourth-Best Price

The market says 12 cents and fourth place; the panel says 12.9% and first. This is the rare row where the panel endorses a market price while rejecting the market's ordering: every seat's case is that 68 sacks is the most persistent input in fantasy defense scoring, and Denver posted it with a 14-takeaway, 2-touchdown conversion rate that has nowhere to go but up. What kept every seat's number at 15 or below was the race's width, and Opus's regression counter above is the honest cap on the case.

Houston, Seattle And The Rams: Three Co-Favorites, Three Fades

The market quotes all three at 20.5 cents; no seat in either round put any of them above 11%. Houston (9.3% blend) earns the panel's respect on the most balanced line, 47 sacks, 29 takeaways, 4 touchdowns, docked only because 29 takeaways is itself above sustainable rates. The Rams (7.1%) profile similarly with less takeaway froth. Seattle (6.1%) is the board's philosophical argument in one row: strip the 7 defensive touchdowns and the panel still sees a top-three floor, but at 20.5 cents the market is paying 2025's most volatile component to repeat. A co-favorite whose price rests on touchdown luck is exactly what a price-blind panel exists to argue with.

Los Angeles Chargers: The Zero-TD Regression Buy

Market 5.5 cents, panel 7.4%, and the case was near-unanimous:

"The LA Chargers (45 sacks, 23 takeaways, 0 TDs) are my favorite sleeper buy—zero defensive TDs on that volume is a statistical anomaly bound to positively regress." (Gemini 3.1 Pro)

Forty-five sacks and 19 interceptions with zero defensive touchdowns is the cleanest positive-regression line on the card; DeepSeek opened at 12% before the revision round trimmed it to 8. Detroit (5.8% against 2.5 cents) and Minnesota (5.5% against 4.5) run the same logic on 49-sack floors with one and two touchdowns respectively; Detroit's price gap is proportionally the board's largest panel edge.

Dark Horses The Panel Won't Dismiss

The panel's 27% bucket is not filler; the seats named its contents. Atlanta (2¢): 57 sacks, second in football, with one defensive touchdown, the exact sack-heavy, splash-light profile the panel buys, and multiple seats flagged it as the bucket's headliner. Chicago (2¢): the league's 33-takeaway leader on an 11-6 team. Jacksonville (3.5¢): 32 sacks but 31 takeaways and 4 touchdowns on a 13-4 roster, Sonnet's regression math scored it comparable to the active tier. Cleveland (3.5¢): 53 sacks in 2025, but the one verified roster fact on the card cuts here, Myles Garrett was traded this offseason, so the panel treated that sack floor as broken rather than durable. On a 32-team board settled by outlier seasons, a fifth of the field at a cent or two is where the variance actually lives.

The Board

The panel's partition also included the bucket covering the 19 remaining defenses, and prices are quote midpoints on a thin board.

The same panel prices the rest of the rank-list family on live boards: fantasy QB1 (Josh Allen 26.5¢ today), fantasy RB1 (Jahmyr Gibbs 28¢) and fantasy WR1 (Puka Nacua 24¢).

Every Seat's Round-1 Number

The per-model split before the revision round, top of the board only. On a phone this table scrolls sideways; the board above carries the headline numbers, which average all eight seats' revised estimates.

Every seat on this panel is graded against real market settlements — records to date: GPT 83% on 1,693 graded calls · Claude Fable 85% on 331 graded calls · Claude Opus 86% on 382 graded calls · Claude Sonnet 84% on 363 graded calls · Gemini 85% on 1,718 graded calls · GLM 80% on 1,874 graded calls · Kimi 84% on 1,863 graded calls · DeepSeek 80% on 1,877 graded calls. Recomputed daily; the full scoreboard is public.

Model estimates generated August 3, 2026, price-blind from live fetched data. Models are frequently wrong; the market price reflects real traders' money.

Every number in this piece lands in our backtest ledger the day it is generated and gets graded against the real season-end rankings on the public model verdict scoreboard.

What Would Change The Panel's Mind

Four event-shaped triggers, each with its direction. A pass-rusher injury of consequence in Denver's front during camp or September would collapse the favorite case and push probability into the bucket. Early-season defensive touchdowns by Seattle or New England, the exact component the panel faded, would be direct evidence against the regression thesis and move both numbers up. A splash-play conversion run by the Chargers, defensive scores on their existing pressure volume, is the panel's stated upside case arriving on schedule and would send their number toward the co-favorite tier. And any star defender trade before the NFL's December 1 window, the kind the exchange's own trade-deadline board prices daily, reprices two defenses at once, exactly as the settled Garrett contract already forced the panel to do with Cleveland.

Settlement Timeline

We re-score this board when the story moves; prices above are as of August 3, 2026, 14:59 UTC.

D/ST1 Odds Vs Your Fantasy Draft

For fantasy drafters, this board is a market-priced answer to a question ADP handles badly: defenses are the least sticky position in fantasy year over year, and the panel's math says last season's D/ST scoreboard is mostly noise around a sack floor. The practical reads: Denver is the only defense whose 2025 dominance the panel treats as load-bearing; Seattle and New England are the names most likely to be over-drafted on touchdown memories; and the Chargers, Detroit and Atlanta are the late-round or streaming names whose underlying lines outrun their reputations. The same market logic runs across the whole draft board on the QB1, RB1, WR1 and TE1 verdict boards, the full market-family map lives on the fantasy football prediction markets hub, and once real slates start, Stokastic Prop Tools runs our projections against live lines every week.

How To Read These Prices

• Eligibility. Kalshi is a CFTC-regulated event-contract exchange, not a sportsbook.
• Liquidity. About 3,200 contracts across 32 markets makes this the thinnest rank-list board; the 20.5-cent co-favorite quotes sit on books as small as 187 contracts, and several defenses have traded three contracts total. Wide spreads mean the mid is a rough estimate, not a firm price.
• Ties. Tied final ranks split the $1 settlement per the contract rule quoted above.
• **Not advice.

The Bottom Line

The market built this board on last season's fantasy scoreboard: three co-favorites at 20.5 cents, each carrying 2025's flashiest finishes. The panel rebuilt it on component persistence and priced its conviction accordingly: the sack outlier first at a fraction of the co-favorites' price, every touchdown-driven finish faded to single digits, the zero-touchdown Chargers bought, and a fifth of the probability parked on defenses the market quotes at pennies. When the season's final D/ST rankings settle this market next winter, every number above gets graded in public, on the same scoreboard as the rest of the verdict lane.

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Verdicts generated August 3, 2026, price-blind. Prices as of August 3, 2026, 14:59 UTC. Panel: ChatGPT, Claude Fable, Claude Opus, Claude Sonnet, Gemini 3.1 Pro, GLM 5.2, Kimi K3, and DeepSeek V4, all eight revised in an anonymized cross-read; the blend is the simple mean of the eight revised numbers.

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