Yeah I’m not sure how high the “Get in price” can go for a game, but Michigan playing for a National Title a 3 hour drive from Campus is probably pushing the limits of how high it can go.
For example, when it was assumed that the Big Ten Title game was going to be Wisconsin and OSU, the cheapest tickets were about $80. After Michigan won, it leapt to like $400-450.
The combination of the number of people who can drive to the game, the size and wealth of the fan/alumni base, and the fact that most Michigan fans are assuming this is probably close to a once in a lifetime opportunity will drive prices through the roof.
The problem with the national title game seems to be it’s a corporate bonanza. Unlike the first round, it’s on a basically random Monday. I don’t see Alabama or GA fans, despite their national reach, paying $2k a ticket, given they are in these games regularly.
I get that. But I assumed the vast majority of those people would be more casual fans that were not as emotionally invested as Riverman seems to be.
Also, there is the fraudulence factor. I’d feel like a huge poser if I were a die-hard fan of a college team and I didn’t go there. For example, I have a buddy who went to Duke for grad school and turned into a hardcore Duke baskeball fan. I give him endless shit* about it, and he can actually claim a legit connection.
*Trust me, this is 100% deserved. It all started when we were talking about basketball, and I made some comment about Bobby Hurley, to which he replied “Who’s Bobby Hurley?”
I’ll buy that and I’ll make allowances for those who don’t go to college, but I say once you go to college somewhere else it should end.
I have an acquaintance who grew up in Alabama, we never talked about football, but if what you say is true, he would have grown up an Alabama or Auburn fan. He went to FSU, and from that point on, it was FSU4lyfe.
It’s tricky if you went to some small liberal arts college with no sports teams or at least no competitive ones. I’m not an unreasonable man. I’ll give those people a pass if they grew up in the college town or whatever.
Another factor with Bama and AU fans is the fact that those programs are basically it in that state, there’s legit nothing else, or there wasn’t historically, not really. Now there are several other FBS programs (Troy, UAB, maybe South Alabama?) but those will never catch up in a hundred years imo.
When I was in high school, this asshole family and their annoying kids moved here from Alabama. We learned that the dad went to UA and the mom to AU (or maybe it was reversed), so that meant they rooted for whichever of those teams was winning at the time. And they were already fucking insufferable before that.
Speaking of Bama-AU, did anyone happen to road trip over to 22 and look in on AU Guy last week? I meant to but somehow forgot. I assume he took that Barn loss hard
Guy who I was in a band with got a girlfriend who was attending Notre Dame (he must have been close to 30 years old) and became a Notre Dame football superfan. He would drive from beyond east side of Louisville to South Bend on weekends to watch the games with some superfan club. By that, I mean watched it on TV with these people who were hopeful they could get tickets some day. He became totally obsessed with it and I never saw him again after a few brief encounters from around that time.
He mostly was a CFB poster from what I remembered, he posted a lot, but he was typically centered around CFB. He posted in the gameday threads a lot. But he would get prettttaaaayyyyy pissy when Auburn lost. He was a diehard AU fan but nowhere nearly as insufferable as ILP.
I think they had a plate setup like KITT from Knight Rider that flipped depending on who won or lost. Seemed like if Bama lost they’d just take off that sweatshirt to reveal and Auburn t-shirt.
I mean, Oklahoma has one professional team across all major sports. Alabama (among others) has none. Hardly seems strange to me to ally for a sports fan to ally with a local team rather than a team that’s perhaps multiple states away. What’s strange to me is people being fans of, like, Notre Dame despite never having gone there and living about as far away from Indiana as you can get. Sure, Catholicism or something, but even then, there’s more than one Catholic university out there that might even be more proximal to you.