How College Football Championship Tickets Topped the Super Bowl

Thousands of fans, who traveled thousands of miles, poured into the stadium for the most expensive football ticket of the year: and it wasn’t the Super Bowl. 

On game day, the cheapest price to get into the College Football National Championship was $3,910, according to Gametime data. That price smashed the previous year's get-in price of $1,267 by a whopping 208% and would go on to even clear the Super Bowl's final get-in price of $3,520 by 11%.

In terms of average ticket prices, the results are perhaps more shocking. The final average prices of the Super Bowl and the CFP Championship were $5,905 and $5,740 respectively—nearly neck and neck, meaning the average fan paid as much for what's technically an "amateur" game as they did for one of the premier professional sporting events in the world.

It wasn't about supply constraints—both were played in pro NFL stadiums with similar capacity. The CFP just had a magical story unfolding this year for both championship contenders. It goes to show that for fans, it takes the forces of Bad Bunny, Lady Gaga, primetime coverage, and world-renowned spectacle combined to match the draw of a powerful story between underdog hometown heroes and the birth of a history-making powerhouse.

Miami's Home Game and Indiana's Cinderella Story

This wasn't just a championship game. It was a home game for Miami—literally played at Hard Rock Stadium in Miami Gardens—and the event of a lifetime for Indiana fans, who before 2025 had not made a major playoff appearance since the 1968 Rose Bowl, a staggering 57-year drought.

Miami entered the playoffs as the 10th seed of 12 and pulled off upset after upset to reach the championships. But Indiana? Indiana's story was something else entirely.

The Hoosiers had transformed from a 3-9 team in 2022 into a 16-0 national championship squad in just two years under coach Curt Cignetti. They were led by hometown hero Fernando Mendoza—a Heisman Trophy winner who had grown up just two miles from Hard Rock Stadium and been denied even a walk-on offer by Miami. When he scored the game-sealing touchdown on a 12-yard scramble in the fourth quarter, he cemented his legacy in Hoosier history and did it in his own hometown. It’s a powerful story, and as Cignetti himself put it, “It’d be a hell of a movie.”

Indiana also has one of the largest alumni bases in the world, boasting over 805,000 living alumni—the largest of any university in the nation as of October 2025. According to Gametime data, Hoosier fans were the most-traveling fanbase of 2025, showing up everywhere from the Rose Bowl quarterfinal against Alabama to the Peach Bowl semifinal against Oregon, and finally to Miami for the ultimate prize. Reports suggested that despite the home field advantage, Indiana outnumbered Miami fans by as much as a 60-40 or even 70-30 split. 

The combination of Miami playing at home and Indiana's massive, devoted fanbase created unprecedented demand—and unprecedented prices. 

No, Super Bowl Prices Didn't Crater

According to five years of historical Gametime data, both the pattern of Super Bowl price drops and the final get-in price are consistent with the 2023 and 2025 year averages. The 2024 Super Bowl's astronomical $10,000+ get-in prices were simply an outlier—a perfect storm of factors that pushed tickets to historic highs.

Average Super Bowl Ticket Prices by Year

Outside of the 2024 anomaly, the Super Bowl LX get-in price of $3,520 and average price of $5,905 are exactly where you'd expect them to be. The Patriots vs. Seahawks matchup in Phoenix delivered everything a Super Bowl should: compelling storylines, star quarterbacks in Drake Maye and Sam Darnold, and all the pageantry that comes with America's biggest single-day sporting event.

So the CFP Championship is not being compared against a particularly weak Super Bowl—it just created its own historic market through the power of emotional demand and once-in-a-lifetime storylines.

College Football Has 99 Problems but the Fans Aren't One

The "professionalization" of college football is undeniable. Year-over-year CFP Championship ticket prices tell that story clearly—from get-in prices of $1,267 in 2025 to $3,910 in 2026, the game has entered a new financial stratosphere. Players now transfer freely through the portal. Coaches command NFL-level salaries and jump between programs with increasing frequency. NIL deals have turned college athletes into professional brands. The result is that over the past five championships, the CFP’s average ticket price rose from $1,088 in 2022 to $5,740 in 2026 — a more than fivefold increase in just four years.

And the discourse is everywhere: College football isn't what it used to be. The portal ruins team chemistry. The money has corrupted the game. Players are mercenaries with no loyalty.

Yet on January 19, 2026, fans paid more to watch Indiana and Miami play for a college football championship than they did to watch the Patriots and Seahawks play in the Super Bowl. Despite all the hand-wringing about NIL, the transfer portal, and the coaching carousel, fans were more enthusiastic than ever.

Why? Because underneath all the business machinations, college football still delivers on its most important promise: stories that hit different. Indiana's transformation from perennial doormat to undefeated national champion in two years is the kind of narrative that reminds us why we fell in love with sports in the first place. Miami's 24-year quest to reclaim their place among the elite. Fernando Mendoza's redemption arc, going from rejected walk-on to Heisman winner playing for a title in his hometown.

You can't manufacture that in a boardroom. You can't portal-recruit your way into that kind of magic.

As much as fans hate the transfer portal, the NIL arms race, and the endless coaching turnover, they love the game too much to quit. They'll complain about it all week on message boards and sports radio. Then they'll pay $3,910 to be there when history happens.

It just goes to show that in football, a powerful story makes all the difference. Spectacle is fun, but you can't put a price on emotional demand. Or maybe you can, and it's $3,910.

Methodology: This analysis is based on Gametime's secondary marketplace data, analyzing thousands of listings across leagues. Average prices represent the mean listing price across all available seating categories. Median prices reflect the midpoint of all listings. "Get-in" prices represent the lowest available ticket price at the time of measurement. 

Rikki Bleiweiss is Content Lead at Gametime. Read more about our data journalism and editorial standards at gametime.co/blog/about