The good news: There are tickets out there for the Indiana-Miami matchup in the College Football Playoff national championship game.
The bad news: They'll cost you. A lot. A whole lot.
In the moments after Indiana finished rolling past Oregon on Friday to win the Peach Bowl 56-22, clinching a spot in the CFP title game on Jan. 19 against Miami — on Miami's home field, no less — ticket prices for the matchup soared.
The cheapest tickets available entering Friday on the secondary markets were around $2,800. After Friday's game, those in-the-door prices soared to around $3,800 — and that was for seats in the final rows of the upper deck of Hard Rock Stadium.
By Saturday afternoon, TicketData — which tracks activity across a number of sites — said the lowest get-in price was just under $3,600 per ticket, including fees.
Some seats available on sites like StubHub, TickPick and Ticketmaster were offered for more than $10,000 on Saturday. Numbers like those will fluctuate considerably in the coming days, but it's already clear that this matchup will be a pricey one. It's a perfect formula for wild demand: Miami playing a home game and seeking its sixth national title (albeit as the “visiting” team, technically) against an Indiana team on this stage for the first time.
“To see Miami galvanizing like it is right now, it’s awesome,” Hurricanes coach Mario Cristobal said Friday after he and his team arrived home from Thursday night's win in the Fiesta Bowl over Mississippi. “And we need everybody in that stadium going absolutely bananas.”
Miami sold more than 500,000 tickets this season for its eight home regular-season games, the most in program history. And Indiana fans showed once again in the Peach Bowl that they'll travel to support their Hoosiers; the stadium in Atlanta was overwhelmingly crimson, swallowing up whatever Oregon green was in the crowd.
“There’s nothing like having a home semifinal game,” Indiana coach Curt Cignetti said in the on-field celebration on Friday night. “There are no fans like Indiana Hoosier fans.”
Not everyone at the game will have to pay the big, big, big prices. Indiana and Miami both receive an allotment of tickets that they can sell — at face value — to season-ticket holders, donors, students and others.
And it appeared Saturday, based on what was showing online, that most of the early sales were for tickets on the “visitor” sideline — because that's where Miami will be for the game. The CFP predetermined that the Fiesta Bowl winner would be the road team and the Peach Bowl winner would be the home team, meaning Indiana will be on the sideline that the Hurricanes typically occupy.