Tickets For The Orange Bowl Are Going For Less Than Half Of Cotton Bowl Prices

Ticket prices for the College Football Playoff Semifinal at the Orange Bowl are dropping mightily on secondary markets. The December 29 Orange Bowl match-up between Alabama and Oklahoma has a get-in price of as low as $65 on the TicketIQ marketplace. If you went on that website on December 20, you would have been able to snag Orange Bowl tickets for $8 less than that.

“For Alabama, it’s the cheapest bowl game over the last decade, playoff or otherwise,” says TicketIQ founder Jesse Lawrence. “For Oklahoma, it’s $249 lower than last years semi-final game against Georgia in the Rose Bowl.”

It is not fair to assess the situation as one where fans just do not care about semifinal match-ups in the College Football Playoff system. For instance, the Cotton Bowl, which serves as host to the other semifinal game between Notre Dame and Clemson, has a bottom get-in price of $146 on TicketIQ. That is a substantially higher get-in price than what the Orange Bowl game is commanding.

The market is barely different on StubHub. Get-in price for the Orange Bowl is $59, whereas the lowest ticket price for the Cotton Bowl is sitting at $120.

Typically, a vacation to South Florida in the middle of the Winter would be a welcoming treat for college football fans. However, Alabama is in the South and Oklahoma is not terribly cold just yet. Perhaps the inclusion of Notre Dame would increase demand for a vacation to typically sunny, but currently windy, South Florida.

Lawrence says that Orange Bowl tickets are down 76% in price since the College Football Playoffs were initially set. However, the prices are still not close to the bottom that the Orange Bowl has experienced in the past.

In 2015, the cheapest ticket for the Georgia Tech vs. Mississippi State game was $3. It is very unlikely that this year’s Orange Bowl ever dips to that deplorable level.