ATLANTA -- It would have been reasonable to worry that the prolonged 12-team College Football Playoff would have exhausted fans' spending money before the final costs of reaching the championship game at Mercedes-Benz Stadium.
Instead, the first 12-team playoff has only fed ticket prices for the sellout.
Ticket resale sites report prices start at about $1,800 and average as much as $2,500 for the championship game.
"We definitely expected demand to be up," StubHub spokesperson Joseph Bocanegra said Thursday. "But I definitely don't think we were expecting demand to be as big as it has been."
Bocanegra said the average ticket price for the game on his site is $2,500, compared with an average of $1,800 for last year's matchup between Michigan and Washington in Houston.
"It's on track to be our best-selling CFP national championship game in StubHub history," Bocanegra said. "It's actually already surpassed the final sales of every national championship game on StubHub."
Vivid Seats, another ticket marketplace, reports the game is its "hottest college football ticket" since 2009, with an average price of $2,269 and the least expensive ticket at $1,452.
Approximately 17% of sales on StubHub have come from the state of Ohio, according to Bocanegra, making it the runaway leader among states. He said Illinois was second at 6%, followed by Indiana at 4%.
That doesn't mean Ohio State is a lock to have the most fans at the game.
Brett Daniels, senior director of communications for the CFP, said each school exhausted its allotment of 20,000 tickets as the game is designed to produce a "neutral site feeling."
Notre Dame's national fan base makes it difficult to predict the fan turnout based on sales by states. Vivid Seats predicts Notre Dame fans will make up 55% of the crowd on Monday night as the Irish look for their first national title since 1988.
