:shock: This is brutal. Tiks are almost impossible to find at any price and scalping is legal here, which doesn't help. Last year's game in South Bend had slightly more expensive tiks, but every seat there is a good one. The last 12,000-15,000 seats in the Coliseum are up by the Olympic torch, behind the western endzone seats. You can't see the entire field from there and some are more than 200 ft from the nearest endzone and a mile high so that even the nearest goalposts look like sticks. Any seat sold after 91,000 is a ticket to nowhere... USC-Notre Dame tickets are scarce, expensive By Ben Bolch, Times Staff Writer November 22, 2006 So, you're not a big-time USC athletics donor and you still need tickets to Saturday's USC-Notre Dame game at the Coliseum for less than the down payment on a luxury SUV? Steve Lopes has three words for you: "There aren't any." Lopes, the USC senior associate athletic director who oversees ticket operations, said the school has only a handful of tickets left — and they are reserved for athletics donors with last-minute needs. Fighting Irish fans don't have it any better. Notre Dame officials say this game is the most-requested road game in school history. Josh Berlo, director of ticket operations, said his office fielded 33,251 requests — and that's only from the alumni and benefactors who participated in a ticket lottery last summer. With three days to go, the game is already the No. 3 college football game in StubHub's six-year history — exceeded only by the 2006 Rose Bowl and last week's Ohio State-Michigan game — according to a company spokesman. Tickets via StubHub had been purchased from $80 to $2,352 as of Tuesday afternoon, and a ticket originally priced at $65 was on sale for as much as $2,700. The average price for a ticket sold was $383 per seat, down from $446 for last year's game in South Bend, Ind. But the drop in price didn't reflect demand, because StubHub already had sold four times as many tickets to this year's game; it could mostly be pinned on the Coliseum's containing roughly 13,000 more seats than Notre Dame Stadium. On EBay, two tickets on the 20-yard line were going for more than $900.
All of these online ticket agencies and e-bay are really sort of a boon for those who can get tickets in the original distribution. I often wonder what would happen if the schools themselves conducted auctions for the tickets.