Julian Sayin led the country in completion percentage, finished fourth in last year's voting, and rates clear of every other contender in our model. The market has him fifth.
Preseason Heisman markets are a popularity contest with a points spread attached, and this year's is unusually crowded. C.J. Carr and Arch Manning open level at +750, with four more inside 12-1. Nobody has separated. That makes it a good year to ask a blunt question: does the betting order match the production order?
Mostly, no.
Our quarterback numbers are expected points added per play across the previous season — how much a passer moved his team's scoring expectation, per snap, adjusted for down and distance. It is not a projection of who wins the trophy. It is a measure of who was best last year, which is the only hard evidence anyone has in August. These are our own calculations, not figures published by ESPN, PFF or CFBD.
Ranked by that measure, with each player's odds alongside: Julian Sayin of Ohio State leads at 0.482 per play over 419 plays, and is +1100. Dante Moore of Oregon is second at 0.382 over 474 plays, at +1000. Josh Hoover, now at Indiana, is third at 0.381 over 415 plays, at +1200. Trinidad Chambliss of Ole Miss is fourth at 0.345 over 563 plays, at +900. Darian Mensah, now at Miami, is fifth at 0.343 over 536 plays, at +1100. Arch Manning of Texas is sixth at 0.253 over 415 plays — and is a co-favourite at +750. John Mateer of Oklahoma is seventh at 0.200 over 537 plays, at +2000.
Two things fall straight out of that list. Julian Sayin rates a full tenth of a point per play clear of the field, which is an enormous margin in a statistic where the gap between second and seventh is 0.18 — and the market has him fifth. And Arch Manning, a co-favourite, rates second-last among the quarterbacks we can rate at all.
C.J. Carr is missing from that ranking on purpose. Our starter resolver has not confirmed Notre Dame's 2026 quarterback, and for the 38 teams in that position the model carries a league-average placeholder rather than a real figure. Publishing that number beside his name would be inventing a statistic. We would rather show a gap than fill it.
The conventional numbers agree with ours. Sayin completed 77.0% of his passes — best in the country — for 3,610 yards, 32 touchdowns and eight interceptions, at a 177.5 rating. He finished fourth in last year's Heisman voting in his first season as a starter, and Ohio State went 12-2.
He also returns into the best situation of anyone on this list. Our ratings have Ohio State first overall with the second-best offence in the country, and his top target, Jeremiah Smith, is back — a unanimous All-American who finished sixth in the voting himself.
The knock on Sayin is that Ohio State's offence is so good it will spread the ball around and no individual will post the gaudy line a Heisman needs. That is an argument about vote distribution, not about quality.
It is also worth noting where the sharper money has already gone. On Polymarket, Sayin has moved to the front of the field at 14%, ahead of Manning and Carr at 12% and Moore at 8% — close to the order our numbers give, and some distance from the sportsbook board.
Manning is the most famous player in the sport and the market prices him accordingly. The 2025 production does not support it. He completed 61.4% of his passes for 3,163 yards, 26 touchdowns and seven interceptions, with a 78.0 QBR that ranked outside the top fifteen nationally, as Texas went 10-3.
There is a real counter-argument and it belongs in the same paragraph: Manning ran for 399 yards and 10 rushing touchdowns, which is genuine production that a per-play passing efficiency number treats less kindly than a highlight reel does. He was also a first-year starter under expectations no quarterback could have met. Improvement is a reasonable bet.
But +750 is not a price on improvement. It is a price on him being the most likely winner in the country, and nothing in last season's numbers puts him there.
Dante Moore turned down a projected top-five draft selection to return to Eugene, and quarterbacks the offence our ratings put first in the country. He threw for 3,565 yards and 30 touchdowns at 71.8%. He is 10-1.
Trinidad Chambliss has the best story and the strangest price. He arrived at Ole Miss from Division II, won the job in week three, threw for 3,937 yards with three interceptions — three, across 445 attempts — added 527 rushing yards and eight scores, took the Rebels to 13-2 and a playoff berth, was SEC Newcomer of the Year and finished eighth in the voting. He then won a legal fight for a sixth year of eligibility. He rates fourth in our numbers and sits third in the betting, which is about the only place on this board where price and production agree.
Josh Hoover is the awkward one. He rates third here on the strength of his TCU season, and he inherits the defending national champion's offence. He is also, by our reckoning, a downgrade on the man he replaced — Fernando Mendoza won the Heisman and went first overall — and that is a difficult context in which to win an individual award.
None of the above is a betting recommendation, and our model has no demonstrated edge against these markets. Heisman voting rewards narrative, availability and team success at least as much as efficiency; a quarterback on a 12-win playoff team will beat a better quarterback on a 9-win team most years, and everyone involved knows it.
Odds quoted are from 6-7 August and move faster than anything else on this page. What the numbers can tell you is where the market's order and the production order come apart. This year they come apart at the very top — and if the award follows the football rather than the name, the board has its favourite in the wrong place.