The Playoff National Championship between No. 1 Alabama and No. 2 Clemson Monday night is a heavyweight title fight, but if you just looked at ticket prices, you wouldn’t know it.
National Championship ticket prices are way down, but that’s not on the teams
Alabama-Clemson should be a great game, but that might not make a Santa Clara trip worth it.
Photo by Michael Heiman/Getty Images
On Saturday, you could find a bunch of tickets on StubHub in the $130 range. The average ticket is a lot lower than previous years’ prices, pretty much no matter where you look. Via TicketClub as of Jan. 4:
TicketClub
Compare that to some of the previous National Championship numbers, and there’s a pretty big gap, per TicketIQ:
- 2014 season: average $479, get-in $251
- 2015 season: average $858, get-in $317
- 2016 season: average $610, get-in $202
- 2017 season: average $2,898, get-in $1,737
- 2018 season: average $4,040, get-in $1,752
The comparatively low ticket price is probably not because people are tired of Alabama and Clemson. The location likely has lots to do with it.
They’re playing this game in Santa Clara, California, at the 49ers’ Levi’s Stadium. It opened in 2014 and has hosted a Super Bowl, but it’s not the best college venue, to put it mildly.
Let Spencer Hall explain:
Getting there is bad.
Levi’s sits a full hour in traffic away from San Francisco, just at the southern point of the Bay that looks like the tapering business end of the lower intestine. The traffic is appropriately craptacular on a good day, and the parking around the stadium limited and expensive.
Playing there is bad.
This is mostly because of the cursed turf, a surface openly reviled by visiting teams.
In 2015, Ravens kicker Justin Tucker fell into a mini-sinkhole on a field goal attempt.
In 2016, after both the Broncos and Panthers struggled to find the right cleats for it during the Super Bowl, Denver cornerback Aqib Talib called it “terrible.”
Pete Carroll called it “lousy” last month, over four years after the stadium’s debut.
Watching football there is bad.
Atmosphere is non-existent, as the massive, Borg-like block of hermetically sealed luxury suites dominates one side of the stadium. In the afternoon, the glass fronts of the suites reflect sun into the cheap seats across the way.
When it isn’t a billion dollar microwave that slow-roasts half its patrons, Levi’s Stadium has all the character of a freshly built county prison.
Years of Pac-12 Championship Game evidence tells us that locals are not that interested in going to watch college games at Levi’s Stadium.
This has been a common theme for Pac-12 Championship Games at the stadium, which has hosted it since 2014:
Additionally, there’s a chance some fans might be staying in San Francisco, which is a pretty long hike to Levi’s Stadium:
The West Coast has plenty of college football fans. But it doesn’t have nearly as many as, say, the South or the Midwest. It makes sense that to fill the stadium, the game is relying on Alabama and Clemson fans. And they have to travel a long way to get there.
With flights and hotels worked in, you’re easily looking at north of $1,000 for one fan who lives near one of the two schools to get to this game and back.
Location and ticket prices aside, Bama-Clemson IV should be a treat.
Not including games against each other, Nick Saban’s Crimson Tide and Dabo Swinney’s Tigers have played 110 games, since the start of the 2015 season. They’ve lost four of them. And none of those came in 2018. This game should be great to watch, even if way fewer people than normal are interested in watching it in person.
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