Sponsor Note: TicketIQ has been our longest and best ticket partner because they keep it real, and because Greg Cohen sends me emails like “I’ve got some budget and I will throw the whole thing at you if you write a Ticket Watch right now!” I’ve also learned half of what I know about the online secondary market from Jesse Lawrence, who’s got to be on the list of ten people in the world who know the most about online ticket sales. If you’re going to be looking on an online site, try the one that’s trying to support us instead of fleece you. TicketIQ’s whole thing is they’re on your side.

I’m going to add on my own that I’ve checked their site versus Stubhub for the same seats and they’re often 15% less because StubHub jacks up their fees so high. These are the same seat (a single out of a pack of 3 in the upper corner):

TicketIQ	StubHub

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Every Michigan fan not holed up in COVID protocol because of a possibly false or months old positive of one family member in a precautionary pre-Thanksgiving PCR test wants to go to the Big Ten Championship. While the championship’s secondary market always gets a flood of interest after the field is set, there’s been nothing like this before. This woke a beast. Via Greg:

Michigan fans are legion, have money, will travel, and haven’t been. Limited supply, meet impossible demand. Since we’re all buyers I’m just going to focus on that side of the deal. We’ll start with the main question:

When do I buy?

Um, last week would have been good? Greg put this chart together for me:

He said he noticed a similar thing with The Game last week, where there was always more market wherever tickets dropped to, so there wasn’t a meaningful drop-off until the dip at the very end. The Michigan-MSU game at Crisler a few years back is another in that vein: there is just a lot of “I will go but tickets are too expensive right now” demand.

If you aren’t going to pay $450 to get in the door, that means you have to ask yourself how much steel is in your stomach. This is going to be true for every event: the secondary ticket market these days has so many professionals working it that there are always seats until about half an hour before the event, because the markets get shut down. If you really want to risk it, find a good tailgate location or a bar where your phone has good signal, and work it with the understanding that if it doesn’t happen you will be fine outside.

You also have being a good fan in your last minute arsenal. People buy four when they’re asked how many they need because why wouldn’t you? Then they get only so many people who can come, or someone tests positive, or someone is too drunk before the game and he and his very angry spouse have to sit out. You can luck into a great spot, especially if you’re flying solo, if you just mingle in the crowd on gameday, especially near the stadium.

[After THE JUMP: What's my price point? Where are all the tickets???]

What do I target?

The seats went retail for $200+ so figure that $300 get-in is a bargain on this one, and if you want a good seat that’ll be $500.

Where are the tickets right now?

[UPDATE 12/1 around noon: Since this article posted we've seen a bunch of brokers drop their packs in the $300/ticket range. Market's starting to move finally]

Many of them are in the hands of brokers or fans of teams who thought they were going (including ours). According to Jesse, only a few hundred seats, most of them on the lower level, hit the market after the market was set. Much of the buyosphere on the other hand has been battling for upper tier get-in seats that nobody’s putting up, hence the market bulge.

The allotments to the two teams are pathetically small. Michigan used their point system and the line got drawn at are you an alum in your 40s who’s been purchasing seats at the 50 yard line for 10 years. Larry Lage reported that Michigan received more than twice as many requests as they had allotment:

#Michigan received 23,000 requests for the school's allotment of 11,000 tickets for the Big Ten championship game.

— Larry Lage (@LarryLage) November 29, 2021

Though Iowa fans have been before, it’s been since that 2015 game against MSU, and they’re close by and larger than you realize. Wisconsin fans have been letting their shares go to waste (and the Big Ten has used that to decrease school allotments) because they’re used to getting trounced by Ohio State. Iowa fans may not feel confident, but I doubt we’ll see a substantial portion of their seats hitting the open market.

That accounts for 22,000/70,000 seats in Lucas Oil Stadium that are spoken for, a rather pathetic number considering how many die-hards Big Ten fanbases need to take care of. It also means there are 48,000 more seats to be sold and resold as layer upon layer of people in charge of things find ways to take their cuts. I doubt there were 500 seats sold directly from Ticketmaster after The Game. Maybe none.

Instead, these seats were purchased long ago by ticket brokers of varying forms, some more useful than others (I like the guys who price them at the likelihood of your team going). Most of the *good* seats were picked up to be sold in exclusive markets that we all don’t have access to, leading to this weird map where there are a lot of max-priced get-in tickets in crummy sections.

You will note there are more seats available on the top than the bottom; that is Iowa vs Michigan.

There are going to be more tickets hitting the market and getting snatched up, probably with a bunch of them on Friday as people who bought four and can fill two put their other pair for sale. There *are* lots of people in this market who have tickets to make a buck, which means they’ll be more savvy than you about how to sell their seats, but that you don’t have to panic about the current supply being The Supply.

Is there any good news?

Tickets are commodities, not stocks, so anyone holding one who’s not going is going to want to discharge that, and the closer to Saturday night we get the more desperate they will be do to so. However, there’s also a waiting market right now of fans who aren’t going to make the trip if it’s $550/ticket but might jump at $350. So as the market comes down it’s going to get shot back up again. The unfulfilled demand of this game is going to keep prices high all week. But you won’t screw yourself by not acting fast.

Cheating seats together:

One good strategy for high-priced games is to buy singles that can be functionally doubles. One trick I’ve used before is to buy a seat lower down, and then a seat that is *next to* a seat on the aisle or even better, next to the last seat in a section. That means you are sitting next to a single person, who might be more than happy to trade down so they get a better seat and you get to sit with your friend.

Jesse put together a whole blog entry a couple of years ago on how they label their sections, and the seats within those sections. Things you should be aware of:

• Seat 1 is the seat closest to the previous section (so Seat 1 of Section 2 is going to be closest to Section 1). There are 12 to 28 seats per row. So if you can find two singles in sections next to each other, go low/high and you could be within a few seats of each other.
• Note that not all sections exist so, e.g. you could find a seat in 121 next to one in 118.
  
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