MIAMI GARDENS, Fla. — The good news: There are tickets out there for the Indiana-Miami matchup in the College Football Playoff’s national championship game on Jan. 19 at Hard Rock Stadium.
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 for the No. 1 Hoosiers (15-0) in the CFP title game against the No. 10 Hurricanes — on Miami’s home field, no less — ticket prices for the matchup soared.
The cheapest tickets available entering Friday on the secondary markets were close to $2,800. After Friday’s game, those in-the-door prices soared to nearly $3,800 — and that was for seats in the final rows of the upper deck of Hard Rock Stadium.
Some seats available on sites such as StubHub, Ticketmaster and TickPick were offered for more than $10,000 late Friday night. Numbers like those will fluctuate considerably in the coming days, but it’s already clear this matchup will be a pricey one.
It’s a perfect formula for wild demand: Miami playing what is essentially a home game (officially, the Hurricanes will be designated the visitors because of their lower seed and used the corresponding sideline) and seeking its sixth national title 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 Ole Miss. “And we need everybody in that stadium going absolutely bananas.”
Miami sold more than a half-million tickets this season for its eight home games during regular season, the most sold in program history. And Indiana fans showed once again in the Peach Bowl that they’ll travel to support their Hoosiers; the stands at Mercedes-Benz Stadium in Atlanta were 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 Friday night. “There are no fans like Indiana Hoosier fans.”
Not everyone at the title game will have to pay the big, big, big prices. Indiana and Miami each receives an allotment of tickets that it can sell — at face value — to season-ticket holders, donors, students and others.