National championship game tickets cost just over $2,000 on the secondary market, and people are buying them
The price is ballooning because of location, location, location.
This may not surprise you, but tickets to the national championship game featuring Georgia, being played in Atlanta, are pretty damn expensive on the secondary market. Add in Alabama as the opponent — Tuscaloosa is only a three-hour drive from Atlanta, and the Crimson Tide nearly played three games in ATL this season as well — and you’ve got the right mixture of hype and distance to create an incredible demand for tickets.
If you’ve got the coin, you can spend over $2,000 for a ticket to sit in the worst seat in the house.
By the way, those tickets are indeed selling. I looked about five hours before writing this story just out of curiosity, and there were a couple tickets on StubHub right at $2,000. They’re not there anymore. This is one of the two biggest games in the history of Georgia football, and people are going to pay for it.
They’re paying for it in ways we’ve never seen too, according to data provided by TicketIQ.
And while the matchup is between two great teams, travel has quite a bit to do with why ticket prices are so steep.
Will UGA will benefit from the home-state advantage? Since the BCS era began, teams playing in title games in their home state have gone .500.
2000: Florida State lost to Oklahoma at Miami’s Pro Player Stadium, 13-2.
2003: LSU beat Oklahoma at New Orleans’ Superdome, 21-14.
2005: USC lost to Texas at Pasadena’s Rose Bowl, 41-38.
2007: LSU beat Ohio State at the Superdome, 38-24.
2008: Florida beat Oklahoma at Miami’s Dolphin Stadium, 24-14. (That’s the same as the Pro Player Stadium mentioned above. The same Miami stadium has changed its name 10 times in the last 29 years, an incredible run engineered only to confuse you.)
2011: LSU lost to Alabama at the Superdome, 21-0.
Those who are able to attend will have wallets considerably lighter than they are today. You can put a high price on the experience, but this is Georgia’s first 50-50 shot at a national title in almost four decades. And it’s in the city where thousands of UGA fans call home, it’s something of a pilgrimage more so than it is a football game. I’d say it’s well worth it.