The College Football Playoff is about money, and it’s about to make a lot of it.
Expanding the national title hunt to four teams — adding two games — will be an instant profit point, with the tickets poised to be the most expensive ever.
The $650 price for the College Football Playoff championship game on Jan. 12 is only for the stadium’s 15,000 high-end club seats. The general seating in the 80,000-seat stadium is $450. Student seating and standing room is $200. The participating schools will each receive approximately 20,000 seats for the game. Last year’s final BCS championship game tickets topped off at $385.
The resale market isn’t much better for the championship game, with the cheapest tickets on StubHub are hovering around $675 for upper corner seats. The most expensive tickets on the website are $93,000 for a field-level suite because somebody definitely needs to pay enough money for a Porsche to watch a college football game.
But that is before any team makes it to Dallas for the final. A ticket to the Sugar Bowl game between Alabama and Ohio State can still be had at around $200, and the game is averaging $437 on the secondary market. It will be the most expensive ticket for a game in the Superdome in New Orleans in five years, since the 2012 Super Bowl.
These astronomical face value prices for the playoff final are still nothing close to a Super Bowl, which had the cheapest tickets set at $500 and the most expensive at $2,600 for last year’s game in New Jersey.
The Rose Bowl game between Oregon and Florida State has tickets that are considerably cheaper on the secondary market than the Sugar Bowl, with hundreds of tickets still available on StubHub for under $150.But that still involves fans from Tallahassee, Fla. and Eugene, Ore. traveling to Los Angeles and paying for everything that goes along with a trip like that.
Basically, with two completely different trips, tickets and everything else, college football fans will either have to make more money this season or budget better if their team goes all the way.
