The year is 1983. Miami is about to play Nebraska in the de facto college football national championship game. In the lead-up, as Miami readied to unofficially host the matchup at the Orange Bowl, $20 tickets were flying around. But in the hours before kickoff, the prices dropped. No, they plummeted.

A scalper sold a pair of tickets for $9 total, according to an account in the Miami Herald. Another off-loaded three tickets and made $7. A third offered a deal: Buy one, get one free. And if that sounds nothing like the ticket market for this year’s national championship game — which also will feature Miami playing at home next week — that’s because it is absolutely nothing like the ticket market for this year’s national championship game between Miami and Indiana.

Times, they change.

As of Thursday morning, the cheapest solo ticket available for Monday night’s game on StubHub, a resale website, was $2,722. On Gametime, another resale site, the lowest was $2,783. This is to say nothing of the average price on the secondary market, which has been going nuts since the matchup was set Friday night. It also doesn’t mean every person who attends will have spent a small fortune (or the price of one month’s rent for a shoebox in Manhattan). Each school was allotted 20,000 tickets to sell at face value — or close to it — to students, alumni and other fans.

Follow Sports

Miami fans who registered before the start of the College Football Playoff could get those face-value tickets for as low as $400 to $500 each. If Indiana students won a lottery, based on seniority and attendance of sporting events, their tickets cost $200 a pop.

But what the secondary market signals is undeniable, part commentary about society at large, part specific to this game happening at this time: The cost of attending major sporting events keeps rising. And Indiana vs. Miami at Miami’s home stadium is a funhouse mirror for that fact.

“It’s almost kind of a perfect storm,” said Matt Chelap, senior vice president of marketing for Octagon, a sports agency. “I don’t think a lot of people realize, because obviously Indiana hasn’t been on the national stage in a very long time, how big their alumni base is. … So you got supply and demand there. Then Miami’s playing at home, so all the money that their fans would spend on hotels and taxis and flights and stuff like that, they get to live in their own bed. So they can spend all that money on tickets.”

Indiana, a perennial doormat before the past two years, is 15-0 and the top-seeded team in the CFP, both a Cinderella story and an absolute bulldozer. Miami, the No. 10 seed, is looking for its first national title since the 2001 season. Both fan bases have good reason to flock to Hard Rock Stadium, which holds over 65,000, no matter the price or distance. And Robert Davari, co-founder and CEO of ticket marketplace Tixr, described the extreme demand as being shaped like a U.

The U curve applies to most major sporting events, according to Davari. At the start, right after teams are set, there is rabid interest in tickets, spiking prices on the secondary market out of the gate. Then sometime within the first week, they’ll start to cool down a bit, once more people put their tickets on the secondary market, upping the overall supply. On Tuesday evening, for example, the cheapest solo ticket on StubHub was comfortably over $3,000. By Wednesday afternoon, when Miami had distributed its face-value tickets to students and season ticket holders, the lowest price on StubHub started with a 2 (but was still four digits long).

As the game gets closer, Davari said to expect another price hike, when fans are finalizing last-minute plans and feeling a bit more desperate. Thursday, then, is in the bottom of the U. This weekend could be when the other side of the letter shoots back up.

Ahead of last year’s national title game between Ohio State and Notre Dame, the average ticket price on StubHub was $2,500, a company spokesman told the Associated Press. As of Thursday, a fan would need to spend more than $2,700 for a seat in the top corner of the stadium, not far from the very last row.

“Coming out of covid, I think, not just in sports, people are putting more money into travel and experiences over things,” Chelap said. “… And live sports has definitely benefited.”

Unlike most major sporting events, the CFP never lists tickets to the public through Ticketmaster, its official partner. Instead, 20,000 tickets went to each school, and the remaining 25,000 went to a mix of members of the local host committee; CFP stakeholders; guests and game officials; sponsors; ESPN; the CFP Foundation; various partners such as conferences, bowls and vendors; and premium packages, according to a CFP spokesman. He noted, “We also lose seats for camera installations and our auxiliary media buildout.”

The overall availability, affected by the stadium’s size and how many tickets are marked for corporate use, has made the week feel a bit like the Hunger Games.

Mark Cuban, an Indiana graduate and billionaire minority owner of the NBA’s Dallas Mavericks, posted to X: “Can Any ticket brokers with experience selling CFP Championship games give any … insights into how they think prices will move between now and right after kick off? … Lots of IU fans want to know!”

On Indiana’s campus, students mused about flipping their $200 tickets for $1,000 (but not anything crazy like the $6,000 prices online).

After Miami announced that fans could join a lottery by donating to the athletic department, Indiana fans posted that they might just give $5, hoping to poach one of Miami’s tickets (and then tell the story forever).

Jack Hanson became a Miami season ticket holder this season. And while many Miami fans complained about being boxed out of tickets at their home stadium, Hanson felt the directions were clear. At the beginning of the CFP, Miami allowed season ticket holders to opt into seats for as many rounds as they wanted. Hanson reserved two title-game tickets, which he didn’t have to pay for unless Miami made the game.

The price? Face value. But trying to help a friend this week, Hanson attempted to log on to one of Miami’s online lotteries. He never even made it into the portal.

“There’s a number of fans hoping ticket prices come down,” Hanson, who graduated from Miami in 2019, said Tuesday. “I don’t know what people are willing to pay, but I imagine if they come down to, let’s say, $3,000, a lot of them will say in their mind, ‘This is okay.’”