Used an abbreviated version to of the kelly criterion along with Markowitz portfolio optimization and applied it to sports betting. All I can say is that past results do not indicate future returns
Same goes for Black-Scholes which includes _future_ volatility.
Even if we had neither price nor volatility, we can still talk about the surface of possible (price, volatility) pairs which are compatible with the model.
The implied vol is a useful way to make sense of the actual market prices of options. We also might have some predictions about the market's implied vol changing going forward and we can reverse those errors back into expected price changes (and maybe trade on them).
The good news is that you don't need to know it exactly, you just need to make a better guess than the bookies (w.r.t. the Kullback Leibler divergence or cross-entropy, whichever takes your fancy).