- - Indiana vs. Miami: $3500 get-in price ... is that a good thing or a bad thing?

Jay BusbeeJanuary 16, 2026 at 2:39 AM

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What exactly is a postseason ticket worth these days? Not just its monetary value, or its ability to get you into the doors of a significant game, though that’s obviously its primary purpose.

A ticket is also an asset — a very limited-use, rapidly-expiring asset, of course, but an asset nonetheless.

Consider, for instance, this year’s national championship game. Ticket prices are incredibly high to attend the game at Miami’s Hard Rock Stadium, for obvious reasons — the game is in Miami, home of one of the two teams playing, and the other team, Indiana, is in its first years of college football relevance. You literally could not script a more perfect matchup for stratospheric ticket prices, and the market has responded accordingly.

Per GameTime, the cheapest price to get into Hard Rock to watch the Hoosiers and Canes is a tidy $2,700 a ticket. That’s down from $3,500 the day after Indiana won the Peach Bowl to clinch a trip to Miami, yes, but it’s still about $1,000 more than the Ohio State-Notre Dame championship game cost at this point last year.

(Also, remember: that $2,700 is just to get in the door. If you want to be anywhere near the field, you’re looking at double, triple or more the cost. Hope you saved your money!)

Ticket prices are always an interesting exercise in what, exactly, the market will bear, how much fans can be expected to pay to support their teams. It’s not uncommon to see ticket prices for less than the price of a hamburger to get into various bowl games, baseball games, even NFL games. (Team names withheld to protect the terrible.)

The flip side of that equation, though, is that the College Football Playoff committee now sees that fans are willing to fork out nearly three grand for a single ticket. Extenuating circumstances like those noted above don’t matter; the money is exchanging hands. And so face value gets bumped up a couple hundred bucks, leading to a commensurate increase in secondary markets … because if you’re fortunate enough to have one of these lottery tickets, you might decide that you can watch the game at home and pocket a whole lot of cash.

Which brings us around to our next ticket topic of the weekend — the Seattle Seahawks’ plan to police secondary market ticket sales. When the Seahawks organization identified certain tickets on the secondary market as belonging to season ticket holders, they emailed the seller with a polite but unmistakable message: Get those tickets off the market or risk losing out on season tickets for 2026.

Seahawks Season Ticket Holders who are reselling their playoff tickets are getting advance warnings. Excellent work, @Seahawks pic.twitter.com/AmaULTNBMa

— Evan Hill (@EvanHillHB) January 9, 2026

If you think that’s too draconian of a punishment, may we introduce you to Augusta National Golf Club, home of the Masters Tournament. If you are fortunate enough to win the lottery for a badge to the tournament, and you decide to sell that badge — which you can typically do at upwards of 20 times the cost of ticket — you are risking a lifetime banishment.

Is that fair? Maybe yes, maybe no, but it’s definitely legal, and it’s likely that more teams will start to use this method of ticket control in the future. It’s already the rule in various European soccer leagues, where fans of the opposing team can’t buy tickets in a home-team section. (This is done as much for the visiting fans’ safety as for the home fans’ unity, but the point remains.)

So this leaves the ticket market with two diametrically opposite forces working it from both sides. Are you with the free market — meaning tickets are more available, but at a substantially higher cost? Or do you go with artificially enforced controls like those laid down by the Seahawks, which can keep prices lower but severely impact supply? Which way do you go?

Original Article on Source

Source: “AOL Sports”