The moment Miami and Indiana locked in their spots in the College Football Playoff National Championship on January 12, the ticket market erupted. Seats that began at roughly $350 ballooned beyond $3,000 almost instantly, with prices jumping the second Miami closed out its semifinal win. They haven’t come back down since. But the surge isn’t being fueled by fan demand alone. Miami’s decision to delay distributing its ticket allotment has left the market starved for inventory. And if Puck’s John Ourand is correct, that bottleneck may be the very thing that eventually brings prices back down.

Ourand reported that each team gets 20,000 tickets to distribute to season-ticket holders, and Miami hasn’t released its share yet. “Once those tickets are assigned, there’s a chance the secondary market will see an influx of new inventory from fans selling their tickets or brokers on the alert for national championship passes,” Ourand explained. “In the meantime, Miami is putting fans who buy a full schedule next season into the drawing for a chance to buy tickets to Monday’s game. Those tickets will be allocated on Tuesday,” he continued.

Miami and Indiana fans are absolutely losing their minds about the cost just to walk through the turnstiles. The cheapest nosebleed seats on the secondary market are listed for more than $3,500. And 50-yard-line seats have five-figure price tags. Even Mark Cuban, with his $6 billion net worth, took to social media to ask whether fans should wait to see if prices will drop as kickoff gets closer. With the game being played at Miami’s home stadium, the pricing situation could turn the crowd heavily in favor of the Hurricanes. 

Ourand checked in with industry experts to see if prices might actually come down. And the answer is basically: nobody has a clue. “There aren’t good comps for most sporting events like this in general, because each market is different,” said Patrick Ryan, co-founder of Eventellect, a company that provides ticketing strategy to rights-holders. “But there’s particularly no comp for this game because of all the unique circumstances we have.” 

Those numbers are already placing this matchup in rare air. As of Sunday afternoon, Ticketmaster, the game’s official ticketing partner, showed only resale listings, with the cheapest seat priced at $3,565. On TickPick, the lowest get-in price hovered around $3,370. That’s nearly double last year’s Ohio State–Notre Dame championship, which previously held the record for the most expensive CFP title game with a get-in price around $1,830.

Industry tracking data suggests the escalation happened fast. Before Indiana’s semifinal win over Oregon, get-in prices sat closer to $2,800. Within hours of the Hoosiers clinching their spot and confirming the game would be played in Miami, those prices jumped into the high-$3,000 range, even for upper-deck seats at the back of Hard Rock Stadium.

Ryan was referencing the perfect storm of factors driving these prices. Indiana is making their first-ever national championship appearance with the largest living alumni base in the country (now estimated at over 805,000). Miami, meanwhile, is playing in the same stadium it uses for home games while chasing its first national title since 2001, adding local demand to an already heated market. Most tickets are initially allocated directly to the participating schools, meaning only a fraction of the full inventory has been visible on resale sites so far.

“With the get-in price being so high, and it’s been that high for a decent number of days now, it’s just really hard to maintain that level,” Ryan told Ourand. “I imagine we’ll see a decrease in some price areas. I do think we could see some softness with premium tickets in between the 30-yard lines. But we don’t know yet. The bottom line is that we haven’t seen all the inventory in the market yet. That’s one big piece of the puzzle.” 

Once Miami releases those 20,000 tickets to their season ticket holders on Tuesday, some portion of those will inevitably get flipped to the secondary market. This could (keyword being could) bring prices down a bit.​ Even so, the ticket market is reacting to more than just timing and inventory. The setting, too, has reshaped the demand curve.

A championship game in their own backyard

For the first time in College Football Playoff history, a team is actually playing for the national championship on its own turf. When Miami beat Ole Miss 31-27 in the Fiesta Bowl semifinals on Thursday night, they punched their ticket back home to Hard Rock Stadium. It’s a stroke of pure luck that only happened because the CFP selects championship sites years in advance. Hard Rock Stadium was locked in as the 2026 host back in 2022, long before anyone could’ve predicted Miami would defy the odds as a No. 10 seed to reach this moment.​

This is genuinely unprecedented in the modern era of college football. No team has played for a national title at its home stadium during the entire BCS and CFP eras, dating back to 1998. Even though Miami will technically be designated the “visiting” team based on CFP pre-set sideline assignments, the logistical reality still favors the Hurricanes. The only comparable situations in recent football history are the 2020 Tampa Bay Buccaneers winning Super Bowl LV at Raymond James Stadium and the 2021 Los Angeles Rams capturing Super Bowl LVI at SoFi Stadium. For Miami, this home-field advantage is massive. And it’s exactly why ticket prices have exploded into the stratosphere.

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That dynamic also changes how the market behaves late. Unlike a typical neutral-site championship, Miami fans don’t need to account for flights, hotels, or extended travel plans, meaning many can wait longer before committing to a purchase. That reduces the usual late-week softening that often brings prices down.

Indiana fans, on the other hand, have to travel cross-country and navigate a secondary market charging over $3,500 just to get in the door. And yet, they’ve shown a willingness to do exactly that throughout the playoff run, flooding road venues in both the Rose Bowl and Peach Bowl. But Miami supporters can literally drive from their houses to watch their team compete. It’s a “once-in-a-generation” scenario that may never happen again in college football. And it’s turned what should be a neutral-site championship into Miami’s biggest home game in over two decades.