Indiana vs. Notre Dame College Football Playoff tickets are a hot commodity
INDIANAPOLIS (WISH) — Tickets for the Indiana vs. Notre Dame College Football Playoff game are a hot commodity.
Notre Dame’s football stadium has 77,622 seats. At minimum, 3,500 of those seats will be filled with cream and crimson because that’s the number of tickets Indiana University’s athletic department has to sell.
Out of the 3,500 tickets, IU has 25% of them are already spoken for. “Members of the band as well as the relatives of the players themselves,” said Jeremy Gray, a spokesman for IU Athletics.
The rest of the tickets for the Dec. 20 game will be put into a lottery. Some students will have better odds in the lottery than others. “We actually have the scan-in rate of every student season ticket holder, so the more you’ve actually shown at games over the course of your Indiana experience the better your chance in the lottery,” Gray said.
Attendance rates for alumni ticket holders will also matter in that lottery, but so will financial contributions to the school. “My guess is if your name is on a building here, you’re probably going to get tickets to the IU-Notre Dame football game,” Gray said.
People who don’t get tickets through the lottery will have to go to the secondary ticket market, and the sticker shock is real. On Stubhub, the get-in-the-door price is $914 for one ticket for the nose bleeds, uncharted territory for IU football fans. “I’ve never seen that,” Gray said.
The IU-Notre Dame game is the most expensive tickets for any of the first round games of the College Football Playoff. Tennessee at Ohio State is $306. SMU at Penn State is $97. Clemson at Texas is $296. Those tickets might be cheaper, though, because all of those stadiums can hold 100,000 people while Notre Dame can only hold 77,622.
“I think that’s a driving factor. I think another driving factor is the novelty of Indiana making it. You’ve got a lot of alums and people interested in those programs within driving distance of the stadium, so I really think those three factors are really driving up the price,” Gray said.
At 8 p.m. Dec. 20, when the first overhead crowd shot is visible, we’ll find out how many Hoosier fans ponied up major cash to see the Hoosiers taken on the Irish.