Lucky LSU students got National Championship tickets now going for cost of a semester's tuition - NOLA.com

Sarah Myers is one of the lucky LSU students who scored the hottest ticket in Louisiana.

In November, long before anyone knew for sure LSU would be playing Clemson University for the College Football Playoff National Championship, she got an email to join the student lottery for tickets.

"I did not expect to get one at all and signed up on a whim," said Myers, a fourth-year biology major. "It was before exam finals when they sent out the email telling people how to get tickets, and nobody was even thinking much about it."

Myers paid $575 for her ticket to watch the game from the lower-level, 300 section of the Mercedes-Benz Superdome. And given what other people are now willing to pay, 10 days ahead of the Jan. 13 game, it looks like a steal.

Tickets in the 300 section are going for as high as $4,500, or more than the cost of a semester's tuition for full-time Louisiana-resident students at LSU. And while ticket prices have been higher in two of the previous five years that the four-team College Football Playoff has decided the national champion, many of the students and other LSU faithful who have managed to get tickets this time around have either gotten lucky in a lottery or have had to pay up.

The resale price for tickets to this year's game has averaged $2,331, according to data compiled by TicketIQ, an online ticket resale site. That's nearly three times what it was for last year's final at Levi's Stadium in Santa Clara, California, between the University of Alabama and Clemson.

The lowest ticket prices appearing online Friday were for $890 on Ticketmaster, the official vendor for the game. On other resale sites, the cheapest ticket was more than $1,000. Those prices were for less desirable seating in the Superdome's upper levels behind the end zones, where tickets have a face value of $425.

Jesse Lawrence, founder of TicketIQ, said that while average prices haven't yet reached the high of $4,040 apiece seen for the 2018 match-up between Alabama and the University of Georgia in Atlanta, they are demonstrating a familiar pattern: When one of the teams in the championship is playing close to home, prices soar.

"LSU is playing basically a home game, and that is driving prices up," said Lawrence. He said there was also "fan fatigue" last year when Alabama and Clemson faced off for the third time in five years in the final, which kept prices more muted than in years past.

The scramble for tickets to see the top two teams in college football duke it out for the national title is second only to the Super Bowl when it comes to how much fans will pay to make it into the stadium for a football game. They are outpacing prices for early rounds of the NFL playoffs by a wide margin.

Tickets for this weekend's NFC playoff game between the New Orleans Saints and the Minnesota Vikings are on offer for as low as $99, or below face value for the cheaper seats, and around $300 for some of the more expensive seats in the 300 section on the 50-yard line.

The murky ticket allocation process adds to the pressure on prices. The College Football Playoff organization allocates half of the tickets to the two finalist teams, which this year meant around 37,000 tickets split between LSU and Clemson. Those tickets are allocated to all sorts of groups, including students, the team and others.

The other half of the tickets go out into the marketplace via a College Football Playoff ticket lottery that is allocated by the October preceding the final. They're also sold via Ticketmaster, the playoff's official reseller, and through Playoff Premium, an outsourced premium ticket-package operation. All of the Playoff Premium plans are sold out.

Two years ago, officials also started allocating an undisclosed number of tickets to CFP-RSVP, a Chicago firm founded by former options traders. This system gives fans a chance to buy an option on up to six face-value tickets for their school making it to the final, though fans whose teams don't make it to the championship are out the upfront payment.

Rob Boaz, CFP-RSVP's chief operating officer, said LSU options were available preseason for $100 and $50 for the lower and upper sections, respectively.

Haleigh Gibson, a junior pre-med student at LSU, said she was certain she would get one of 500 free tickets allocated to students because of all the "priority points" she had accumulated attending LSU sporting events, which increase your chances in the draw.

She said she signed up for the free ticket lottery, but opted not to purchase a ticket at face value, a decision she's regretting.

"Now, I am left to the secondary market to find an affordable ticket, and it’s not going well!" she said.

Prices for this year's match-up were even higher until Ohio State lost to Clemson in a semifinal game on Dec. 28. TicketIQ data show a drop of about $1,000 in the average resale price after that loss and a surge in tickets coming onto the market, though prices have since crept back up again.

It's not clear what ticket prices might do in the final run-up to the game, said Adam Budelli, head of NCAA partnerships at StubHub, which is LSU's official ticket resale company.

"This is a unique year given that the semifinals were further out from the final than historically it has ever happened," Budelli said, noting that the final last year was just a week after the semis.

This year, the game will be played on a Monday night, more than two weeks after the semis, which is like the turnaround for the Super Bowl and will give more time for ticket sales in the secondary market.

As far as Myers is concerned, she was lucky to have noticed the email notification that a lot of her friends missed.

"They didn't really advertise much at all about how you sign up for tickets, and I had a lot of friends who didn’t even know they could do it," she said. "If you didn't happen to check your email (back in November), you didn't really know about it."