If you are one of the thousands looking to get a ticket to the big game next Monday in Miami, then you may want to think again. Ticket prices for the Indiana/Miami game are skyrocketing and are on pace to become some of the most expensive ever for a football game.
As I am typing this, the cheapest ticket price that I have found is still a little over $3,000, and if you are looking to bring your entire family with you, then I hope you either saved up or plan on maxing out those credit cards or potentially selling your kidney on the black market.
Of course, I’m just kidding about selling body parts. Please don’t do that to go to a football game, but why are ticket prices for this national championship game so high? Well, there are several things that factor into it.
For starters, Indiana has never won a national title in football. Sure, there is plenty of rich history when it comes to the hardwood, but on the gridiron, Indiana hasn’t seen this level of success before. They just won their first conference title in over 55 years, and they are making their first-ever national championship appearance.
If you watched the Peach Bowl last Friday night, you could clearly see how many Hoosier fans were in the stands compared to the number of green there. I would say the split there was about 90/10 in favor of Indiana. As crazy as it sounds, Indiana has the largest living alumni base of any school in the country, and a lot of those people are willing to pay top dollar to see them make history.
On the other hand, you have Miami, which hasn’t played for a national championship in nearly 25 years. Once a power in college football, the Hurricanes haven’t been in this position since that memorable game against Ohio State, where the phantom pass interference penalty was called. Even as a nine-year-old kid, I couldn’t have made a better call there than those refs that night in Tempe.
Plus, this game is being played in Hard Rock Stadium, which is where Miami plays its home games, even though it still doesn’t make sense to me that they play there. I mean, seriously, playing your college home games in an NFL Stadium in 2026 seems cheap to me. Either way, it’s where the Hurricanes call home, which means Miami fans don’t need to travel very far to see their team play for the biggest prize in the sport.
If you look at the history of the national championship games over the years, ticket prices have only gone up. The average ticket price for the Georgia/Alabama title game four years ago was just over $1,000, and now it’s nearly five times that amount.
As someone who has never been to a national championship game, it would be fun to go as a casual fan, but not for that price. Even if you are an Indiana fan, I can only imagine the cost to go to the Rose Bowl, Peach Bowl, and now Miami.
Between travel, hotels, and tickets, I can only imagine the tens of thousands of dollars that had to be spent to be able to go to all these games. Unfortunately, that’s college football today. It’s all corporate, and for whatever reason, the sport feels the need to make these old BCS bowls happy.
As I have said many times, we should put more of these games on campus. In fact, I believe that this game on Monday should be the only playoff game that isn’t on campus, but I doubt that will happen. No matter how you feel about it, one thing we can all agree on is that it costs way too much money to attend all these games. I know it sounds crazy, but maybe we should be more worried about the fans than just the bottom line. Because after all, it’s the fans that make this sport go.
