Rufus Peabody, universally considered one of the sharper bettors around, has decided that he’s taking his Massey-Peabody college football rankings private after having provided them for 14 years.
Establish The Run, universally considered one of the sharper fantasy sites around, has decided that after five years, it’s taking its B2C prop product off the market and going the B2B route.
These are, to be clear, different entities doing different things with different products, but there is a throughline here. We’ll let this tweet from SharpX Analytics’ “SigmaSquirrel” do the heavy lifting.
In short: Due to the rise of prediction markets, people (like Peabody) and groups (like ETR) are finding themselves in a brand new position. They offer products or tools that very literally move markets. But those markets had natural caps due to the nature of sports betting, namely sportsbook dollar limits. Getting down money has always been, and remains, a barrier.
But not so much anymore.
Now, prediction markets have effectively removed the barrier.
That “worth 100x more” statement by SigmaSquirrel up there? I asked him if that was some social media hyperbole.
“That is literal,” he told me. “And that may be underestimating it for those at scale.”
A whole new world
Before prediction markets, being really good at originating sports betting numbers presented a challenging business problem: You could possess extremely valuable information — ETR’s prop model, Peabody’s rankings — and still have a difficult time turning that information into money.
The prop situation may be the best example.
“The economics of having your own fair values have completely changed,” SigmaSquirrel said.
Previously, he said, selling projections made more sense than betting them. A bettor might find a $250 or $500 limit on a prop, even offshore. And at regulated sportsbooks, anyone who demonstrated the annoying habit of winning could expect to be cut at the knees.
So if you were building out a great prop model, you had two choices. Choice one was to assemble teams of bettors, hunt for outs, spread action around, and spend your days trying to figure out which account could get which bet down where and for how much.
Choice two? Charge people for the numbers.
“It was more lucrative, and certainly less brain damage, to sell projections for player props,” SigmaSquirrel said.
But now prediction markets have flipped that calculation.
“I’m not going to say limitless liquidity,” SigmaSquirrel said. “But I will tell you, it certainly looks like there’s going to be limitless demand for market makers who have their own models.”
Which brings us to Mr. Peabody.
Peabody has published Massey-Peabody college football ratings for 14 years. People used them. SigmaSquirrel, for one, had them incorporated into his own college football model.
His reaction to Peabody pulling them?
“Bullshit,” he joked. “That doesn’t help me, but I’m happy for him.”
Peabody’s explanation? Less colorful, same logic.
“We were making prediction markets for college football last year as well, and had a very good year there,” Peabody told me. “And I think at this point, you can scale in ways that you couldn’t before prediction markets as an originator.”
Publishing his ratings always came with a cost, namely the markets moved toward those values. Prices became more efficient. Peabody’s own edge shrunk.
“Providing that information hurts the market in subsequent weeks,” he said. “At this point, it really is just a different ecosystem.”
But now? Prediction markets are suddenly allowing that information to be monetized at a much greater scale, which makes giving it away — or even charging for it — much less attractive.
Captain Jack Andrews of Unabated remembers a perfect example of what this looked like in the old world.
Four or five years ago, Andrews said, Peabody was willing to open his notebook on Super Bowl props — angles, edges, the stuff he used himself.
Why was he willing to share?
“He said, ‘This is only worth about $100,000 a year to me now, because it’s really tough to get down on Super Bowl props,’” Andrews said.
Now fast forward to 2026.
“I’m sure those Super Bowl prop angles Rufus uses are probably worth 10 times the estimate he made five years ago because of prediction markets,” Andrews said. “It’s a new world.”
ETR makes a change
The ETR situation arrives at a similar destination, but from a different starting point.
Adam Levitan, ETR’s co-founder, has been a little surprised at the rumors floating around concerning the company. He put them to rest here, telling InGame that no, ETR hasn’t been sold, and no, it isn’t abandoning its core fantasy business. In fact, he said, the company is investing more in fantasy than it has in the past.
All that’s changed is they are removing the prop product. It was a separate product users could purchase. Props were released, and then before you could say “I’ve been limited,” the prices would move across every sportsbook. ETR, for those of a certain age, was basically the modern day EF Hutton. (When ETR talks, people listen.)
The props product was simply becoming a lousy trade for the gang at ETR.
“The money we were making from the props product wasn’t that large, especially relative to the stress, time, and headaches involved,” Levitan said.
Levitan said ETR has been receiving B2B inquiries for years about the prop model, but it had always passed.
Now?
“We’re kind of looking at this as a test,” Levitan said.
He would not disclose who ETR is working with, other than making one point clear: “We aren’t selling the data to a sportsbook.”
Tough sell
Andrews sees the distinction between ETR and Peabody as important.
ETR began as a fantasy operation and discovered that very good fantasy projections could also create very good player-prop numbers.
But selling a consumer betting product has its own problems.
“If there’s one thing I’ve learned the hard way, it’s that selling anything to anyone in the sports betting world is such a pain because everybody is gun-shy,” Andrews said.
Customers have been scammed. They’re skeptical. They share subscriptions. And there is a limit to what you can reasonably charge a large group of retail bettors.
Peabody sees the same structural problem.
“I think selling a product like a rating system or projections to the masses is just not a good business model in general,” he said. “It’s very difficult to make it work, because you cannibalize yourself and it becomes a race to the bottom.”
Charge a modest price and lots of people get your numbers, saturating the market. Charge an enormous price and you have only a handful of customers.
Meanwhile, if the numbers are truly good, every customer is helping push the market toward the number you produced in the first place.
ETR has a particularly strong case that its numbers are, in fact, good.
“The sharpest people in the space understand how good our stuff is, because we moved the market so much and we have such a long history of winning,” Levitan said.
That ability to move the market is precisely what makes ETR attractive on the B2B side.
“If I’m a trading team, why in the world am I going to try to build my own in-house origination when I can just go buy someone’s numbers that already have real credibility and scale?” SigmaSquirrel said.
Plug in the projections. Let the traders trade.
Surprise winner
And while all this may seem like a problem for the little guy — after all, if you’ve been using the Massey-Peabody index or ETR’s prop models, you are now out in the cold — SigmaSquirrel sees it differently. He thinks this may end up being a positive development for the smaller, sharper bettors among us.
“Within 10 minutes of an ETR props release, the markets basically steam hard toward their fair value,” SigmaSquirrel said.
If fewer of those projections are being sold publicly, that release steam disappears with them.
“These OSBs aren’t going to have the ETR release steam shaping these lines on a Thursday night, Friday afternoon, or Saturday morning,” SigmaSquirrel said. “That steam is going to be less this year.”
So if you happen to know what you’re doing, the “wrong” lines might hang around much longer than before.
No brainer
SigmaSquirrel laid out the hypothetical in the bluntest possible terms.
“If I’m ETR, I can sell a bunch of picks packages,” he said. “I can monetize that for maybe low seven figures a year. It’s a good business. Or I can make a million dollars a weekend if I’m betting on myself on a prediction market.”
Twenty-some football weekends later, the math starts getting stupid.
And this isn’t theoretical for SigmaSquirrel, either. His own business previously released NBA projections to subscribers. But that’s over with.
“Our business is now exclusively combo RFQs,” he said.
His old explanation for why a sharp bettor might sell picks — I’m limited everywhere, I can’t monetize this myself — no longer holds much water in his view.
“There’s no excuse now,” he said.
Maybe that overstates it, but the math has changed dramatically.
For decades, the sports betting information business was built around the fact that you could know something valuable without having an easy way to bet enough money on it.
Prediction markets have effectively removed that barrier, and now the question isn’t how much someone will pay for your information.
The question is why you’re selling it to them in the first place.
