I’ve had enough requests for advice on the madness of tourney tickets to attempt a Ticket Watch on the subject, though I warn you a week’s worth of research yielded little in the way of fact. It did yield two themes, which were “buy late” and “choose your seats carefully.”
I also started tracking the secondary market for the Jerryworld game vs. Florida, which is looking not equally bearish but still quite buyer friendly.
Let’s address the more immediate event first:
Big Ten Tournament Tickets: Less Than Parking
Dude! 
Lower bowl for $6 is bottoming out. You can still buy tickets from the ticket office, and the building should be empty enough to move down close enough that Duncan Robinson can hit you in the face with a basketball 40% of the time.
You might as well use the sponsor’s site. I spent way too long refreshing Craigslist in hopes of running into a pair of “I bought too many” seats at center court or something, but keep just seeing this guy in section 405 with tickets to Northwestern vs. winner of Rutgers/Ohio State.
The championship game right now is running around $40. Via Ralph Garcia at TicketIQ:
“Saturday's Semi-Finals is currently the most in-demand session, averaging $180 per ticket with cheapest seats $69. Friday's Night Session featuring Maryland is close by, with a $166 average ticket price and cheapest seat clocking in at $74. Cheapest ticket for Sunday's Championship Game is $37.
As you might expect the Maryland side of the bracket is more expensive, since they’re the only contender in reasonable driving distance. Michigan’s on the other side of the bracket, so a Terp loss to Wisconsin can only help the championship game. Michigan has a sizeable DC contingent and Purdue doesn’t, so our side of the bracket will be mostly driven by Michigan’s success. I expect a weak secondary market since nobody is going to buy those unless we upset the Boilers.
Official advice is treat this like a GLI: for the opening rounds just show up and sit wherever you want for the price of a pint, then expect to pay $40-$50 for decent seats if Michigan makes the final game.
Also let’s all hope the Big Ten looks at a map next time they schedule one of these. At least the new Pistons/Red Wings arena is an opportunity to have it in Detroit, i.e. the geographic center of the conference, someday.
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[Hit the JUMP for March Madness and the madness of King Jerry]
NCAA Tournament Strategies
The three rules of NCAA tournament ticket pricing are Location, Location, and Geography.
The road to Phoenix will go through… pic.twitter.com/Y2zIb1fp2Y
— NCAA March Madness (@marchmadness) November 17, 2014
Basically, as long as Purdue’s alive, Indianapolis games will be more expensive, etc.
None of those sites are particularly close if Michigan ends up at them. Indianapolis is the only one in fair driving distance. I figure getting Michigan off the 8/9 line will be difficult. Michigan could get something cool like a 2nd round game vs. Villanova in Buffalo, or something stupid like Zaga in Sacramento. If you’re in New York, you’re rooting for Michigan to wind up in the East bracket, where a run to the Sweet 16 would mean a trip to Madison Square Garden. It seems more likely, given the committee’s history of trying to screw mid-majors, that the hot Wolverines wind up with the Zags out West.
Counterintuitively, secondary market tickets for the NCAA Tournament tend to go down as the games progress. Upsets shake loose the “I have to go” fans of the top seeds, dumping a ton of tickets onto a market that’s often dragged down by the limited fanbases of Cinderellas.
On the other hand the 1st/2nd round and regionals are scheduled well enough in advance to spark a run on tickets as soon as they’re released, and then a paucity of resales since the decision point came so near the date of the event. If you buy tickets on Monday at noon, what’s the likelihood that you’ll want to get rid of them by Thursday? The few who bought too many are competing with a flood of speculators who bought extra expecting to sell above face.
There’s also an interesting price curve that fortune.com found when looking into this:
For last year's March Madness, SeatGeek compared the median listing prices on Selection Sunday with the prices listed on the day before the actual game, and discovered an interesting trend. On the day before the games, the listing prices had dropped an average of 27% for the Sweet 16, and an average of 36% for the Elite 8.
That author fell into the “average seat” trap so the data aren’t so good. As a reminder: the ticket resellers will talk about the average price of seats in inventory because it’s easy to calculate and much higher than what most people will actually pay. But that’s kind of like me pricing our “average kickstarter price” by including the amount of times Brian is willing to show up at a kid’s birthday party in a Terrelle Pryor jersey for $12k. I find the lowest get-in to be more valuable since it’s representative of the tickets that are actually moving. In context of the article’s claim, I think they’re mistaking a bunch of super-high-priced tickets being relisted at just above face as a general price drop. Ignore those and it seems more likely that the secondary market for regional games is like any standard football game, i.e. magnetically attracted to the face price.
The most expensive tickets tend to be the Final Four. Fans of those teams get a week to plan, and have to buy tickets to both games. Then half of them will lose, dump their championship tickets online for whatever the going rate is, and get the hell out of town.
Your Michigan ticket strategy: The location matters and the matchup matters, but in general it’ll be cheaper than face except a) Michigan in the Sweet 16/Elite 8 at Madison Square Garden, or b) the Final Four, period.
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Back<---- to Jerryworld
Why??? [WSJ]
The filth of Sarumon is washing away, but we have this one last neutral site game in Jerryworld to start 2017. Florida is going to be way more pliable than Alabama, and less likely to want to fill the most lifeless building in the most lifeless metro area in America.
The bidding has started at about $200 for a decent seat, and I’m guessing that sticker price is going to be just about the most anyone will pay for it. If you contact the Alumni Association right now you can get cheap seats with other Michigan fans for $105, which if you’re going you won’t be mad about. Remember to factor in $40 for parking, because everything between Dallas and Fort Worth is either a cubicle or a $40 parking spot.
Right now there are a ton of seats available in the $140 range. I expect they’ll stay there through the summer, and the market will come down near the end. Like a bowl game, you can probably still get tickets fairly cheap on site.