By all accounts, Saturday was a record-breaking event for Kalshi trading volume, as Week 1 of the NCAA college football season kicked into full gear. But one premature Kalshi settlement, of what turned out to be a highly controversial outcome for the Western Michigan at Michigan game, resulted in millions of dollars being clawed back and ultimately awarded to the correct forecasters.
On Sunday morning, CNN senior reporter Marshall Cohen confirmed what had been posted the previous evening by multiple Kalshi account holders on X. According to Cohen, Kalshi has admitted that it “wrongly and prematurely settled the ‘Western Michigan vs. Michigan’ market, as if Michigan lost. They clawed back payments to initial incorrect ‘winners,’ reimbursed the initial ‘losers,’ and then paid the right people.”
Just before 11:00 p.m. Eastern Time on Saturday evening, Michigan quarterback Bryce Underwood launched a Hail Mary pass out of the end zone in a last-ditch effort to save the Wolverines from a humbling Week 1 defeat. After agreeing to pay Western Michigan a $1.5 million appearance fee just to (presumably) get blown out in “The Big House,” it appeared as if WMU had done the impossible: defeated a nationally ranked Wolverines team on their home field.
The clock showed exactly zero seconds, the official NBC Sports broadcast showed the 12-7 result in WMU’s favor as “final” (see 0:38 of this CBS Sports cross-coverage video), and WMU players celebrated an apparent upset victory. However, Big Ten officials decided to place an extra second on the game clock, which gave Michigan another opportunity to score a game-winning touchdown, which it did. The Wolverines avoided a Week 1 upset at home by an official score of 13-12.
The “why” isn’t nearly as important, in terms of prediction market regulation, as the “what happened” in this case. The assumption posted by multiple observers is that the market was prematurely settled because someone representing Kalshi “settled” it manually near or at the moment when the clock read 0:00, WMU players were celebrating, and the official NBC Sports broadcast labeled the 12-7 score as “final.”
By doing so, the market immediately (and incorrectly, as it turns out) paid out trades that had been placed in favor of an unlikely Broncos victory. As confirmed by Cohen, Kalshi eventually changed its outcome to reflect the true final score and clawed back proceeds from the traders it had initially awarded. The CFTC-regulated prediction exchange then paid out the correct winners, who had forecast that the Wolverines would win the game.
While rival prediction exchange Polymarket US experienced a service outage that made it impossible for many users to participate in college football trading at all, Kalshi broke its own record for single-day volume. According to Ticker Tracker, more than $2.29 billion in trades were placed on Kalshi over the course of Saturday’s 24-hour calendar cycle.
Kalshi’s previous record had been achieved during the 2026 World Cup. It will be interesting to see if Kalshi establishes a new daily trading high on Sunday, September 13th, when more than a dozen Week 1 NFL regular season games are scheduled.
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