NFL Head Coach Changes: The Market On Who's Out, And What It Does To Fantasy Values

Kalshi runs a 22-contract board on NFL head coach changes, asking which pro football head coaches will be out before September 1, 2026, and it has taken 1,192,075 contracts of real money to reach a boring answer: nobody. No coach quotes above a 3-cent YES ask, so the top of the board implies about 3% at the ask and most of the field sits near 0.5% at the midpoint. For a DFS player that is the useful part, because the risk to your Week 1 projections is not waiting to happen. It already happened, last offseason, to ten teams that are not on this board at all.

The Quick Answer

The market prices every returning NFL head coach at 3 cents or less to be gone before September 1, with New England's Mike Vrabel the nominal top of the board at a 3-cent ask over a 2-cent bid, a 2.5% midpoint read. Sum every contract's midpoint and the whole 22-coach board comes to about 18.5 cents, an expected count of 0.185 departures, or about a 17% chance that at least one of the 22 resolves YES. Read that as the top of a range, not a number: the bids on this board total only about 5 cents, so a good chunk of that 17% is built from asks nobody is bidding against. Trading closes at 11:59 PM ET on August 31, which means the board covers roster cutdown and nothing after it. The ten teams that actually changed head coaches, the three buckets they split into and how much to trust your own answer in each, and the one contract carrying 78% of this board's volume and almost none of its information are all below.

New to event contracts as a data source? The sports prediction markets hub covers how to read them; this page is the coaching layer.

Where The Board Stands

Prices are the live YES bid and ask fetched from Kalshi's public API on the morning of August 13, 2026. Only eight of the 22 contracts quote an ask above a penny, and only four carry a bid of any size at all. The nine rows broken out below are the nine busiest books on the board.

The row that jumps off that table is Green Bay: the second-busiest contract on the board, more than 93,000 traded, and it still quotes a penny with nothing bid underneath. Turnover and conviction are different things on a board this thin, which is the theme here and why the New England line interests me more than its price does.

The Ten Teams Missing From This Board

Twenty-two coaches are listed; the NFL has 32 teams. The ten absent from Kalshi's board match the ten that made a head coaching change in the 2026 offseason:

Ten changes in one cycle is the most since 2022, and two of them are the same men trading buildings: John Harbaugh left Baltimore for the Giants, Kevin Stefanski left Cleveland for Atlanta. Mike Tomlin's 19-year run in Pittsburgh ended in the same window. That is not a hot-seat story anymore, it is a settled fact, and it means 31% of the league opens 2026 under a new head coach while the market calls the other 69% settled.

The board and the transaction log answer the same question from opposite ends. Kalshi is pricing the 22 buildings where the head coach stayed. The ten missing from it are the ones your projections should be least confident about.

What A Coaching Change Actually Does To A Projection

A coaching change is a fantasy repricing event for the same reason a trade is, and the trade deadline board is the sibling market to read beside this one. But the ten are not one bucket, and treating them as one is the mistake I see most in August. What actually moves a projection is the play-caller, and a head-coach hire only moves the play-caller sometimes. Mike Tomlin did not call Pittsburgh's offensive plays, so a new name on that door does not by itself mean a new offense behind it. What I sort on is how much documented play-calling work the new staff brings with it.

The most useful row is Buffalo's: the only one of the ten where the new head coach was already running the offense, and so the one team here whose prior usage patterns I would still treat as a baseline. At the other end sit the five rows where our pass found no play-calling record to lean on, and those are the projections I discount hardest in August. That table is a confidence ranking built on how much documented work each staff brings, not a claim about who will be good.

The three inputs it runs through are the same everywhere. Seconds per play sets the size of the pie, pass rate over expectation decides how much of it reaches the pass catchers as target share, and the backfield split decides whether a running back projection is usable or a coin flip. Our backfield battles tracker covers the rooms actually in flux, and the running back strategy guide covers why volume beats efficiency once one settles. What the table changes is how much weight to put on your own answer.

The rule I build a Week 1 pool on: for the 22 settled teams, last year's usage is a defensible starting point; for the ten above it is not, and preseason ownership tends not to know the difference yet. That is a leverage question as much as a projection one, the same edge the win-total ladders surface at the team level.

New England's 928,000 Contracts

Now the forward promise from the top. Of the 1,192,075 contracts traded across this entire board, 928,443 of them, about 78%, sit on one market: Mike Vrabel's. It also holds the only 2-cent bid on the board, meaning it is the one contract here where somebody is actually willing to pay more than a penny.

Read that before you read anything into it. Vrabel is a second-year coach in New England, and our August 12 pass on this board turned up no reporting attaching a departure to him. Kalshi's rules are strict about what pays: the contract resolves YES only if the head coach leaves, or announces he will leave, before September 1, so a midseason firing settles NO. The volume most likely marks where retail attention pools on a national brand rather than where the risk is, and the churn stat agrees: 928,443 contracts traded against 397,344 of open interest means most of that money passed through rather than stayed, and the contract still asks 3 cents on a board where 3 cents is the ceiling.

Which brings back the ten. The busiest contract on this board belongs to a coach for whom our August 12 pass found no departure reporting, while the ten teams that actually changed coaches are not on the board at all. The order book is pointing at the wrong 22 teams; the offseason transaction log is pointing at the right ten.

How To Read These Prices

• Price Is Probability. A contract settles at $1.00 if the event happens and $0.00 if it does not, so New England's 3-cent ask pays about 32-to-1 on a roughly 3% chance. Nothing here is priced as likely.
• Fees Shift The Effective Number. Kalshi's taker fee is $0.07 x price x (1 minus price) per contract, and it rounds up to the next cent per order. On a 2-cent contract the formula computes to about a seventh of a cent, so the rounding, not the formula, is the entire toll on penny markets. The full comparison against DFS rake lives in Kalshi fees vs DFS rake.
• Thin Books Distort, And This Board Is The Extreme Case. Eighteen of these 22 contracts, 82% of the board, have no bid at all; only New England, San Francisco, Washington and the Jets have anyone bidding. A 1-cent ask with nothing bid under it is a thin-book quote, not a consensus, and it is why the board's 18.5-cent midpoint sum falls to about 5 cents if you price it at the bids instead.
• Not Advice. These are market prices presented as data.

What Changes Once Games Start

Trading closes at 11:59 PM ET on August 31, and only a departure or an announced departure before September 1 can resolve any of these YES. The question DFS players actually care about, which coach gets fired once games count and which coordinator inherits the offense, lives in the in-season markets that reprice on Monday mornings. We rebuild this page in place as that cycle turns. One honesty note on what this page is: our AI panel already scored this exact board on August 12, and that verdict lives in the coach hot-seat model verdict. I did not re-score it here, so what you just read is the order book and the transaction log rather than a model. Our prediction-market calls are publicly graded on the model verdict scoreboard, including that August 12 pass on this board.

So the bigger projection signal is the coaching cycle that already finished, not the one this board is still pricing. Ten teams changed head coaches last offseason, and across all 22 contracts the market prices an eleventh pre-September departure at 18.5 cents combined. Those ten carry the clearest head-coach-related projection error in your player pool, and they are findable: pull the new-staff teams up in the NFL DFS projections, ownership and stacks in the DataHub and compare where the field is pricing usage against what the new staff has actually shown. If you have not run a slate through the engine, you can try the Sims free and see the ownership side of that gap yourself.

Elsewhere on the exchange: the NFL awards board prices Coach of the Year from the other end of this story, the fantasy football prediction markets hub maps every market family a fantasy manager can use, turning Kalshi prices into projections covers the conversion math, and Dave Loughran's coach speak piece covers how much of what these coaches say in August to believe.

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