Tickets for CFP title game cheap on secondary markets

SANTA CLARA, Calif. — Qualifying for the college football championship game never has been harder for teams other than Alabama and Clemson. Getting into the stadium to watch the Crimson Tide and Tigers play for the title for the third time in four years has perhaps never been cheaper. With the College Football Playoff final located thousands of miles away from the two campuses, possible fatigue for fan bases of teams that have become annual participants in the playoff and a game site in an expensive market lacking college football die-hards, prices for tickets for Monday night’s championship at Levi’s Stadium have been plummeting the past few days. “It’s sort of a perfect storm of factors at play this year,” said Jesse Lawrence, the founder of TicketIQ , a secondary ticket market. “It’s a big ask for fans to come and that’s why we’re seeing the prices the way they are.” Tickets for the championship game are now available for just $135 on the secondary market, according to TicketIQ , less than half of what the price was before the semifinals and well below the face value price of $475. StubHub had even cheaper tickets available Wednesday night, with seats priced at $115 — less than double the cost of a parking pass on the ticket resale site. The CFP picked Santa Clara as its site for this year in part out of hope of broadening college football’s fan base. The Bay Area is much more of a pro sports region and it appears that not enough locals want to brave rush-hour traffic to attend the game Monday night. Games at California and Stanford struggle to draw big crowds and the annual Pac-12 championship game needs tarps to cover unused sections. Tickets for the championship game are considerably cheaper than those for the SEC championship game last month in Atlanta between Alabama and Georgia and both CFP semifinal games. With both schools still having tickets available and the secondary market filled with relatively cheap seats, there’s a distinct possibility of empty seats for college football’s biggest game. The main factor is the location of the game. The two schools are an average of 2,428 miles away from the game site, the longest distance since TicketIQ first began tracking the distance in 2011. Flights from South Carolina and Alabama were running around $1,000 round trip and hotels in the Bay Area are notoriously expensive, making the trip costly even if the tickets aren’t. With the two schools having been to this game so often so recently, demand for tickets is soft. In contrast, last year’s title game in Atlanta between Alabama and Georgia was the closest location to the schools at an average of 136 miles, and the most expensive ticket, with the get-in price on the secondary market reaching $1,752, according to TicketIQ. That was just slightly higher than the prices for the Alabama-Clemson rematch in Tampa, Fla., in 2017, and the Oregon-Auburn title game in 2011 in Glendale, Ariz.