NFL Rushing Yards Leader 2026 Odds: Model Verdict on the Full Board

Kalshi's rushing-yards-leader board is a 25-name argument about who touches the ball most in 2026, and the market has spread its conviction across five names: Bijan Robinson at 13.5 cents, Derrick Henry at 12.5, Jahmyr Gibbs at 12, and Jonathan Taylor and defending champion James Cook III at 11. We handed the whole field to an eight-model AI panel, price-blind, with every player's verified current team, age, and full 2025 usage line fetched the same morning, plus the league's complete rushing-champion ledger back to 2000. Then each seat read the others' anonymized reasoning and could revise. The panel returned a different race: a four-name top tier with Henry cut out of it, and its sharpest disagreements sitting on a 32-year-old legend and an 8-cent second-year back in Denver.

The Quick Answer

Eight price-blind AI models make the 2026 rushing title a two-man photo finish between Jonathan Taylor (10.5%) and Bijan Robinson (10.4%), with James Cook III (9.1%) and Jahmyr Gibbs (8.3%) right behind. The market's second favorite is the panel's loudest fade: Derrick Henry at 12.5 cents against a 6.6% blend, an age-32 discount every seat applied independently. The value runs the other way on Kyren Williams, 2.5 cents against a 4.7% blend, nearly double his price. And the panel puts 9% on the field, because there is no field contract: if anyone not listed leads the league, every contract on the board loses. The full board, every seat's number, and the one roster fact that moved half the panel are below.

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

The Market

Kalshi's board (KXLEADERNFLRUSHYDS-27) settles on one rule, quoted from the contracts: "If [player] leads Pro Football in rushing yards for the 2026-2027 regular season, then the market resolves to Yes." Twenty-five players are listed, 23 running backs plus Josh Allen and Lamar Jackson, with a listed expiration of February 1, 2027. About 33,000 contracts have traded. Two structural notes before any argument. First, there is no field contract, so an unlisted leader resolves the entire board No; the panel prices that scenario explicitly. Second, the 25 midpoints sum to roughly 123 cents, so every raw price runs rich and prices should be compared to each other, not to 100.

Two timestamps: panel verdicts were generated the morning of August 3, 2026, price-blind; prices were fetched from the exchange at 12:22 UTC the same day. Prices on this page refresh on our standard market-pulse cycle, with the "as of" stamp as the evidence.

What The Fetched Record Says

The ledger behind the panel covers every rushing champion from 2000 through 2025, and it defines the job. The winning total has ranged from 1,327 yards (Kareem Hunt, 2017) to 2,097 (Adrian Peterson, 2012), with a median of 1,697; Saquon Barkley's 2,005-yard 2024 and James Cook's 1,621-yard 2025 are the two most recent entries. Repeat winners are real but rare: four players have led more than once in the window, with Peterson's three titles the record. And in 26 fetched seasons, no quarterback appears once, which is why the panel prices Allen and Lamar Jackson at two-tenths of a point despite their rushing production.

The 2025 usage columns supply the candidates. Taylor carried 323 times for 1,585 yards and 18 touchdowns at age 27. Cook won the title on 309 carries at 5.2 per. Robinson put up 1,478 rushing yards on 287 carries plus 79 catches for 820 at age 24. Henry went 1,595 on 307 carries at 5.2 per carry, at age 32. Gibbs went 1,223 at 5.0 with 77 catches. Nobody on the board lacks a case; the argument is about which cases survive contact with a 17-game season.

How The Panel Read It

Seven of eight seats opened with the same mechanism, stated cleanest by Claude Opus:

"The ledger says the winner needs roughly 1,600-1,800 yards (median 1,697), which is a volume outcome, not an efficiency one: 300+ carries with no roster rival." (Claude Opus)

That frame sorts the card fast: the panel's top four are the four backs who already carried title-level volume in 2025 at prime age. The fifth name who did, Henry, ran into the panel's one hard rule about age:

"I'm fading Henry hard at age 32 despite 1,595 yards — the cliff is imminent and Lamar vultures rushing yards." (GLM 5.2)

And the single card fact that moved the most numbers was a roster line, not a stat line:

"The single biggest card fact is David Montgomery listed in Houston: that vacates Detroit's committee and makes Gibbs (243 carries, 5.0, 77 catches) a plausible 290-carry bellcow, so he is my most underrated name." (Claude Opus)

The Revision Round

Each seat then read the other seven's anonymized reasoning and could revise. Cross-model disagreement fell from 0.88 to 0.55 points per outcome, and the round produced a real argument rather than a merge. One seat pushed back on the Gibbs case, contending Montgomery's line already reflected a Houston season, which would mean Detroit's backfield had already been Gibbs's alone in 2025 and no carry bump was coming. The 2025 game logs, fetched the same morning, settle it: Montgomery played all of 2025 in Detroit and signed with Houston this offseason. The vacated-committee read stands, and by round two seven of eight seats priced Gibbs at 7% or better. The other durable revision ran the opposite direction: two seats that had opened double-digit on Cook trimmed him on the repeat question, with Claude Fable's version of the argument — "Cook repeats less often than the public thinks — only four repeat leaders since 2000" — carrying the round.

Jonathan Taylor, Indianapolis Colts: The Cleanest Profile On The Board

Market 11 cents, panel 10.5%, and the panel's narrow number one. The case is arithmetic: 323 carries was the largest fetched workload on the board, it came with 18 touchdowns and no committee behind him, and at 27 he sits inside the age band that has produced most of the ledger's winners. Taylor has also done the thing before, leading the league with 1,811 yards in 2021. Six of eight seats put him first or tied for first; the two that did not still had him within a point of their leader. In a market where the favorite trades at 13.5 cents, the panel's read is that the most probable single outcome is the guy priced third.

Bijan Robinson, Atlanta Falcons: Right Favorite Price, Wrong Gap

Market 13.5 cents, panel 10.4%. Every seat respects the profile: 1,478 yards at 5.2 per carry at age 24, with enough receiving work (79 catches, 820 yards) to make him unbenchable. What the panel declines to pay for is the margin the market gives him over Taylor and Cook — on a 123-cent board, 13.5 is roughly an 11% honest probability, which is almost exactly the panel's number. The disagreement is not about Robinson; it is about the two and a half cents of daylight between him and the volume profiles priced beneath him.

Jahmyr Gibbs, Detroit Lions: The Montgomery Dividend

Market 12 cents, panel 8.3% and rising through the revision round. The bull case is the card's biggest roster fact: Montgomery's exit hands Detroit's backfield to a 24-year-old who averaged 5.0 per carry on 243 attempts while splitting work. Scale that efficiency to a 290-carry solo load and the title math appears. The check: 12 cents already prices a chunk of that scaling, Detroit's offense also feeds Gibbs through the air (77 catches, which pads fantasy value but not rushing yards), and the panel's 8.3% reflects a real probability that the Lions simply sign or draft another committee.

Derrick Henry, Baltimore Ravens: The Board's Biggest Fade

Market 12.5 cents, panel 6.6%, the largest absolute gap on the board. Nothing in the fetched 2025 line supports it: 1,595 yards on 307 carries at 5.2 per carry is a title-shaped season. The entire fade is the age column. Henry turns 33 in January, no player his age appears anywhere in the fetched 26-year ledger, and the panel treated that base rate as stronger evidence than one more elite season. Add Lamar Jackson siphoning designed carries in the same backfield and all eight seats independently priced Henry below 9, five of them below 7. If he beats it, he beats history, not just the field.

James Cook III And The Repeat Question

Market 11 cents, panel 9.1%. The defending champion returns everything that won him the title: 309 carries at 5.2 per on a 12-5 Buffalo offense. What caps him in every seat's book is structural. Repeat champions are rarer than the public assumes (four in the fetched window), and Buffalo's other rushing threat is its quarterback: Josh Allen took 112 carries and 14 rushing touchdowns in 2025, goal-line work that comes straight out of Cook's total. The panel holds him fourth in probability while conceding he has the best recent proof of anyone on the board.

The Denver Problem And The Rest Of The Fades

RJ Harvey, Denver Broncos (8¢, blend 1.2%). The board's largest proportional fade, at roughly a seventh of his price. The market sees a second-year back on a 14-3 team; the fetched line says 540 yards on 3.7 per carry with 47 catches, a profile the panel read as a passing-down back being priced like a bellcow. No seat put him above 2.5%.

Omarion Hampton, Los Angeles Chargers (5¢, blend 2.4%) drew a more respectful fade: 545 yards in 9 games is a real per-game pace, but the panel wants to see the 17-game version first. Ashton Jeanty (5.5¢, 3.4%) carries volume (266 rookie carries) on a 3-14 Raiders team whose game scripts fight him. And Kenneth Walker III (4¢, 1.9%), now in Kansas City by the fetched roster data, lands in a good offense that has not fed a back 290 carries in years.

Dark Horses The Panel Won't Dismiss

• Kyren Williams, Los Angeles Rams (2.5¢, blend 4.7%): the board's clearest value by ratio, nearly double the price. A fetched 1,252-yard season on 259 carries for a 12-5 team; Gemini priced him as high as 7.5%.
• Javonte Williams, Dallas Cowboys (3¢, blend 3.3%): quietly put up 1,201 yards on 252 carries in his first Dallas season; four seats gave him 3% or better.
• Breece Hall, New York Jets (1.5¢, blend 2.4%): 1,065 yards on a 3-14 team; the bet is volume by necessity, and Gemini's 3.5% led the panel.
• Chase Brown, Cincinnati Bengals (1.5¢, blend 2.0%): 1,019 yards on 232 carries with the passing-game role to stay on the field every down.

The Board

The panel also priced the no-field scenario: a 9.0% blend that any player not listed leads the league, the fifth-largest number on the board.

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-ending leaderboard on the public model verdict scoreboard.

What Reprices This Board

Preseason rushing-title prices move on a short list of knowable events: August depth-chart and injury news for the four-name top tier, any Detroit backfield addition (the direct test of the panel's Gibbs number), Henry's workload signals out of Baltimore camp, and the season's first month of carry counts, which historically separates the 300-carry profiles from the committees within five weeks. This page carries its fetch date for exactly that reason.

Rushing Title Odds Vs Your Fantasy Draft

For fantasy drafters, this board is a market-priced volume projection, which is most of what a running back's draft value is. The panel's four-name top tier matches the top of the fantasy RB1 board, where Gibbs and Robinson are the market's co-favorites, and the divergences are the interesting part: the rushing board pays Taylor's pure ground volume while RB1 scoring rewards Gibbs's catches, and Henry's 12.5-cent price here is a name-value warning that transfers directly to his draft cost. The full map of fantasy-relevant Kalshi families is the fantasy football prediction markets hub, the award races that shadow this board live in the Kalshi NFL awards hub, and for weekly projections against live lines once the season starts, Stokastic Prop Tools runs that exercise every slate.

How To Read These Prices

• Eligibility. Kalshi is a CFTC-regulated event-contract exchange, not a sportsbook.
• Liquidity. About 33,000 contracts traded across 25 names, a thin book by award-market standards; spreads are wide and single orders move quotes. The midpoints sum to roughly 123 cents; compare prices to each other, not to 100.
• Time. The listed expiration is February 1, 2027; capital is committed for the full season.
• **Not advice.

The Bottom Line

The market and the panel agree this race belongs to proven volume at prime age; they disagree about who owns it. The market's board is topped by Robinson and Henry; the panel's is topped by Taylor and Robinson, with Henry cut nearly in half on an age base rate no seat would waive, and its spare conviction spent on a 2.5-cent Kyren Williams and a 9% field the venue does not even sell. When the season's final leaderboard settles it, every number above gets graded in public, on the same scoreboard as this panel's NFL MVP board and the rest of the verdict lane.

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Verdicts generated August 3, 2026, price-blind. Prices as of August 3, 2026, 12:22 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 estimates.

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