Season tickets are going out, which means this year’s market is about to start trading. Those of you who think in terms of hotels (cough cough stay downtown cough) and flights are already trying to figure out which game to come to, and securing seats. So I figured it’s a good time to preview this year’s secondary ticket market based on past trends.
I haven’t tried predicting the market this early before so bear with me. The data provide an enticingly safe shore to stick to, but I don’t know how much value to you I’d be if I ignored a few plausibly navigable lanes.
The home schedule and face pricing:
Movie Night
Where: Michigan Stadium
When: July 15th at 7pm
What Movie? Beauty and the Beast
Face: Free. Seating is like the spring game.
Worst-case scenario: A cartoon candelabra is whimiscal and endearing, but becomes grotesque in live-action. First you’ll feel as awkward as Hermione Granger looks, and feel even worse when your daughter’s crawling into your bed with nightmares for the next week. Speaking of nightmares…
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HomeSure Lending Classic vs Florida in the Empty Heart of Texas
LET’S GO PARKING!
Where: Jerryworld, a post-apocalyptic cement hellscape between Fort Worth and Dallas, Texas
Face: $118 (upper deck, row 19, 40 yard line)
Current Secondary Price: $121 (way upper deck, corner, row 13)
Best value right now: Face. You can get a lower bowl seat for $225 right now.
Market outlook: I’m getting a lot of emails about this game because NFL stadium games overprice the face. This creates a weird market where you can still buy tickets from the ticket office and the secondary ticket market bottoms out at that face value. The only way such a market breaks is if one team suddenly becomes unwatchable (doubtful for the first game of the season) or on the ground outside the stadium when all those big groups of tickets are still unsold. This is a good college football game moved to charmless, soulless shrine to a megalomaniac, and unlike a bowl game Dallas’s weather on Labor Day weekend is going to be a significant downgrade from home (for the Michigan fans—Floridians welcome any excuse to get out of the swamp from June-October). However the Michigan-side tickets are already officially sold out.
Arlington is also a charmless giant parking lot with ridiculous parking fees so it’s difficult to get the whole ticket market out there like a bowl game would. I’ve wanted to try bringing an inkjet printer you can plug into your car then buying a last-minute ticket online so this might be the game to do that.
The big bit of advice for this one is the $10 per ticket to get out of the corners is worth it—this stadium was designed to get as many wallet-carrying organisms into it as possible, and the consensus is many (not all) of the crappy seats are particularly bad.
Worst-case scenario: Let’s never do this again.
[Hit THE JUMP for more pleasant afternoons, and evenings]
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Cincinnati
Where: Ann Arbor
Face: $75 plus ~$15 in fees. You can get still get those ticket packs (MSU plus 1-3 yawners) from the mothership but only stranded single tickets remain. I don’t recommend them—MSU is not MSU(!) this year and only Minnesota has a chance of going over face.
Single-game tickets will go on sale in a couple of weeks, with donors getting a few days to buy before it opens up to the community. If you’ve got zero standing, sign up for their email list and you’ll make their equivalent of silver elite.
Current Secondary Price: $50 in trade, $80 for 2 e-tickets together. These are a ton of single tickets on the market right now and lists aren’t yet consolidated so you get this weirdness:
…where it’s the same ticket.
Best value right now: Face. But wait for the secondary market to open up.
Market outlook: This could get trickier than a typical mid-major September game for myriad reasons:
- Michigan could lose to Florida.
- Cincy isn’t that far away and a new coach well known to Ohioans could get a pretty large road fanbase.
- Weather in September can be great or awful
- Still the home opener and it’s a Harbaugh season.
But it’s Cincy, not a name opponent. If you get your tickets for $50 each out the door it’s fine. You’ll probably be able to scalp them for $40 or $20 the day-of, depending on factors you’ll know about by then.
Worst-case scenario: Potato.
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Air Force
Where: Ann Arbor
Face: $50 with $15 in fees. See above.
Current Secondary Price: $50, and not likely to be more.
Best value right now: Your friend who bought these because he wanted to make sure he got MSU tickets.
Market outlook: Dog of the year, made even less valuable because they’re bundling them with MSU tickets. The secondary market is going to be trying to offload these for face and won’t give up until gameday, when they’ll be all over the place from $30 to “Do you want them? Come pick them up.” If your friend says buy him dinner for them, tell him they’re worth two beers.
But still more than two Cokes.
Worst-case scenario: Being unable to move while they’re carting a precious starting defensive lineman off the field with Michigan still uneasily up just 13-7.
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Purdue
Where: West Lafayette
Face: $30 plus $10 in fees.
Current Secondary Price: $56
Best value right now: You can get PRIME seats (that’s what they call them) for under $100. Purdue football ladies and gentlemen. You can find cheap tickets any time; I’d just buy seats from the ticket office. Call them, make up something about how it’s a gift for your Purdue wife, and they’ll set you up.
Market outlook: Given the current conference alignment and the fact that the world is ending when the cable contract is up, you won’t get another chance to visit Purdue in your lifetime, probably. That said this one won’t be expensive—Purdue fans have a new coach but this team isn’t going to be any good and Michigan, though the best game on the home schedule, isn’t going to move their needle enough, especially on a year they have Indiana at home and Louisville in Indianapolis.
Worst-case scenario: Jeff Brohm trick play extravaganza. Also West Lafayette is suprisingly unattractive as college towns go.
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Michigan State
Where: Ann Arbor
Face: $125 plus $20 in fees plus $125 in tickets to other games.
Current Secondary Price: $229
Best value right now: Wait for some embarrassing losses then ask your Sparty buddy if he’d get them through the MSU ticket office for you. They get a lower endzone section that isn’t half bad, and Sparties are not going to be interested this year.
Market outlook: The secondary market still thinks this is a rivalry game, and there are strong rumors this will be a night game to bump the price up. Michigan fans are gonna want to go, but the lack of Sparties will keep the price around $100-$150 by gametime I bet.
Worst-case scenario: Sparty gives Michigan a game because this is the only game they have to play for. Then while trying to get out of town you’re assaulted by a roving band of helots who’ve been drinking all day, and are now carrying off our couches while chanting “Defeat with Dignity.”
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Indiana
non-zero chance this image from their homepage was doctored to fill in the empty seats
Where: Bloomington
Face: $10 (Youth) or $70 plus $15 in fees.
Current Secondary Price: $54
Best value right now: Go pick your seats on the IU website and use the promo code TICKETS10 (update: that didn’t last long) or join their email list and wait for a better one. Seriously they have online promo codes for football tickets!
Market outlook: IU has visits from Ohio State and Wisconsin as well this year so the Michigan game isn’t interesting except that they always tend to play us close and lose. This time they’ve got a good enough defense to do that again despite Mike DeBord, but it’s late enough in a rough schedule that you can probably bet you’re walking into basketball season, not a high-interest game. Buy some crappy seats from the ticket office if you can’t find them on your walk to the stadium, and move down.
Worst-case scenario: IU has a decent case that they should have won.
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Penn State
The strip of red on the left are sections NAU through NLU, and will be mostly Michigan fans.
Where: Beaver Stadium in Happy Valley which includes State College, wherein you’ll find University Park.
Face: All ticket requests go to an interest email form so it’s hard to tell.
Current Secondary Price: $160.
Best value right now: Not yet on sale really, but you can get someone’s season tickets for a fair $160.
How to read PSU ticket sections: I actually like their system. Your ticket section starts with an N, S, E, or W, and then the letters of that section start with “A” (in the corner”, center at “E”, and roll through L. If there’s a third letter it means it’s a deck up, e.g. “U” for upper deck. So NEU would mean north endzone, centered, upper deck.
Market outlook: It’s a white-out game at night…of course.
2015 prices went down to $75 online and got super-cheap off the standard market—with the hoops team playing Xavier on Friday night a bunch of core fans who’d bought tickets from the Alumni Association way in advance decided it wasn’t worth the trip. The Michigan section wound up with empty seats, which means if you called somebody’s uncle on Friday night and got him to call the athletic department to changes his tickets to will call, you could have gotten in for the price of a lawn cut.
This again is a game I urge you to use Michigan avenues to secure your seats. That’s because PSU’s secondary market is a weird one for a multitude of reasons: cultish fanbase, long drives, night game, by far their best home game, coming off a bye). I’ve been in the worst seats in the building (for the worst part of the worst game of football ever played) and you can still see everything just fine.
If Penn State turns out to be pretty bad, ticket prices will drop and you can find good seats in the lower bowl for prices in the $150 range, however their schedule before Michigan isn’t that daunting: Akron, Pitt, GSU, @Iowa, Indiana, @NW. There are two potential losses in there. They also have a bye week before us, so there’s an extra week for whatever trend to keep affecting the market. You don’t want to be in week 2 of that trend if they’re undefeated; if they have losses to Iowa and Pitt you can wait and see if prices will tank after Northwestern, but buy before the uptick.
Of note, I’ve been to two away games at Penn State now and confirmed this with my PSU friends, and the on-the-ground scalping market for Michigan games is always seller- not buyer-friendly. Michigan is a huge draw for one, but the bigger thing is they’re in the middle of nowhere, and State College is a tiny town. In Ann Arbor or Madison or Columbus a lot of the early morning street sales are locals—honey would you go sell our extra tickets then pick up Jacob from soccer practice? That doesn’t happen as much in Happy Valley, and in course the tickets you can get on the street are largely scalpers and (this happened once to me) sometimes multiple-copy printouts. I recommend if you’re planning on going, get your tickets through the Michigan Alumni Association or suck it up and buy online. You should find them around $150 or even $100 after a PSU loss, and at that point it’s worthwhile.
Worst-case scenario: Lavert Hill gets called out by their goofy stadium announcer. #GrapentineIsaTreasure.
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Rutgers (Homecoming)
Where: Ann Arbor
Face: $75 plus fees don’t buy this one for face.
Current Secondary Price: $41 (!!!!)
Best value right now: Waiting.
Market outlook: The latest attempt to make Rutgers happen is to make it the Homecoming game. This is unlikely to make Rutgers happen. This is a bad mid-major we play every year with no traveling fanbase, and in proximity to way more interesting games. The homecoming price tag on the season tickets doesn’t matter because that’s really just an Ohio State/Michigan State surcharge, and the fact that the plane of face value is so easily broken really opens up the likelihood of this game being really cheap to buy online.
Worst-case scenario: Missing the superfluous two-point conversion in front of Mom and Dad would be mortifying.
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Minnesota
Where: Ann Arbor
Face: $70 plus fees
Current Secondary Price: $67.
Best value right now: Secondary ticket market right now.
Market outlook: If there’s a ticket besides Ohio State you should buy early this year it’s this one. Minnesota fans do travel well and P.J. Fleck makes this an exciting year—they’re underrated in my opinion from Claeys losing them some games they had the abiilty to win given the talent on hand. The market is already reacting to that, pricing even single-ticket hand swaps around face value.
If you miss the opportunity I bet these will be trading at $80 for most of the year, until it gets close to Game Day and the regular home cycle dips it down at the end. Weather in early November is also a toss-up—a cold rain can drop a game like this to…not gonna make that joke again. Even in nice weather scalping will still be plenty doable, but I’d bring extra $20s unless you really want to play the market.
Worst-case scenario: ROW THE BOAT! t-shirts for days.
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Maryland
Where: College Park
Face: Single-game sales won’t be availabe until August—season tickets are less than one Michigan-Ohio State game though
Current Secondary Price: $70 and this is speculative.
Best value right now: Wait.
Market outlook: Maryland isn’t that good this year, and every time Michigan has played there or they’ve played here the ticket’s been a dog. There are factors for that, but it’s still mid-November in a game not expected to be very competitive. I think decent seats for $50 is fine, and it’s worth waiting this one out to reap the last-minute dumps.
Worst-case scenario: Maryland fans want to come.
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Wisconsin
The Art! The Art! The Art!
Where: Madison
Face: $110 for season ticket holders but Wisconsin is a marketplace seller, using Stubhub for individual ticket sales.
Current Secondary Price: $180
Best value right now: Use the Alumni Association or buy through Umich.
Market outlook: Wisconsin tickets are a tough market and this is a quasi-rivalry they haven’t seen in a long time (and they smell blood). It’s likely both teams will lose a few games before they meet so I’d gamble on buying after one of those (Badgers preferably for multiple reasons). I wouldn’t expect to get them below face, and $150 sounds about right. One thing in your favor is Iowa is right before us on their schedule and the road rivalry the week after, so Wisconsin fans don’t necessarily have to circle that one weekend in November. On the other hand an Iowa win easily gets them to 10-0 and prices will blow by $200 in a heartbeat.
Worst-case scenario: Last year’s Iowa game against a better team.
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The Game
[Bryan Fuller]
Where: Ann Arbor
Face: “$125” but all the ridiculous prices on the rest of the season ticket package are really Ohio State ticket surcharges.
Current Secondary Price: $246
Best value right now: ^that.
Market outlook: This is the real question isn’t it. The Game tends to start bidding at $200 and go up from there unless somebody’s team sucks. The only dips come when there’s a loss between them. But they also tend to cap at $350 since at that point people look at a day in the cold versus covering most of their season ticket package. Also Michigan fans aren’t as good as Ohio State fans about holding onto their seats/not letting them fall into the hands of the enemy—just the nature of the culture.
Last year it got up to $340. The lowest plausible is $155, which is what it went to in 2015 for a hot minute after OSU lost to Michigan State. It had been $255 for awhile and peaked at $300. Of course with OSU’s flagging hope Michigan’s got up again.
If Michigan is going into The Game with three losses it’ll be a more buyer-friendly market, but Ohio State fans will buying at too high of a rate to get it down near face again. On the other hand, Harbaugh. If you’re planning to come home for Thanksgiving and be in Ann Arbor on Saturday, unless you’re willing to wait the whole season to see this come down, you won’t feel too bad about this price. The other option is to watch all season and jump at $180.
Worst-case scenario: 2015