Published: Wednesday, 12/16/2015 – Updated: 34 seconds ago Expensive flights, non-playoff venue cited as ticket sales lag BY DAVID BRIGGSBLADE SPORTS WRITER COLUMBUS — For Ohio State football fans, a trip to a New Year’s Day bowl game against Notre Dame once would have seemed priceless. This year, it just sounds expensive. High-priced flights and higher expectations have conspired to temper demand for the marquee nonplayoff game of the bowl season. An Ohio State spokesman said the school has sold about 9,000 of its allotted 12,500 tickets to the Fiesta Bowl. With round-trip flights from Ohio to Phoenix starting around $800, the university’s ticket office has shifted its target to Buckeyes fans in Arizona and on the West Coast. That strategy reflects the wide-reaching national appeal of both Ohio State and the Fighting Irish. According to the ticket search engine SeatGeek, Ohioans are making up only about 13 percent of the game’s online resale market. Fans in California and Arizona have accounted for 19 and 15 percent of sales, respectively, while interest is also strong in Nevada. “Based on where people are shopping from, I would think a lot of fans in the crowd will be alumni from the two schools who live in the Southwest or on the West Coast,” SeatGeek analyst Chris Leyden said. A Notre Dame spokesman said the Irish sold out their bowl tickets. For Ohio State, the lagging market is no surprise. The sixth all-time meeting between the Buckeyes and Notre Dame may be a television executive’s dream. But coaxing OSU fans who had their heart set on a return trip the playoffs to shell out thousands of dollars for the school’s sixth trip to the desert in 15 years — and a rematch of the 2006 Fiesta Bowl — is hardly an easy sell. While scarlet-mad fans flood rival stadiums during the regular season, Ohio State — like most other schools — has traditionally struggled to unload its pricey allotment of bowl tickets if neither a national title nor the Rose Bowl is in play. OSU sold 9,983 of its 17,500 tickets for the 2009 Fiesta Bowl against Texas and less than half of its allotment for the 2012 Gator Bowl and 2014 Orange Bowl. Sales are on a similar pace this year, though Ohio State and the Big Ten will be on the hook for a lot less money. The College Football Playoff system introduced last season requires schools to buy only 12,500 tickets to the New Year’s Six bowl games — a drop from the 17,500-ticket minimums of the Bowl Championship Series era that left teams and leagues eating millions of dollars of unsold tickets. (The Big Ten absorbs the cost of its schools’ leftovers.) As Ohio State attempts to dump its remaining 3,500 tickets — all upper-deck seats priced from $100 to $165 — one thing working in its favor this year is a decent secondary market. According to SeatGeek, the Fiesta Bowl is the fifth-hottest bowl ticket with an average resale price of $225. One school with no such ticket worries is Iowa, which plays Stanford in its first Rose Bowl appearance in 25 years. Iowa received more than 50,000 requests for its 23,000 allotted tickets and has watched its fans besiege the secondary market, driving up the average resale price to $708 — more than double the going rate for the most coveted playoff game. Tickets to the two New Year’s Eve semifinal games — Alabama-Michigan State in the Cotton Bowl and Clemson-Oklahoma in the Orange Bowl — are selling for an average of $320 and $316. The Sugar Bowl between Oklahoma State and Ole Miss is going for $268. Contact David Briggs at: dbriggs@theblade.com, 419-724-6084 or on Twitter @DBriggsBlade.
Continue Reading: Ohio State fans weigh bowl costs
