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In the days and weeks leading up to last weekend's grinding football clash between rivals Texas and Texas A&M, the median price per ticket was over $2,000 on StubHub. Hours before the game, the cheapest seats cost over $750 on SeatGeek and were located in the upper reaches of Kyle Field, a stadium that seats 102,733 people.
Those profits from those markups went to the private resellers rather than the schools, but athletic departments are following suit. In search of revenues to attract and pay athletes, they are raising ticket prices to better capture market value and taking gameday upscale. It's a necessary shift: Colleges and universities can no longer afford to offer amateur experiences in the stadium when they're paying for a professional product on the field. But with that evolution comes the erosion of some of the traditions that have defined college football for a century.
The earlier days of the sport prioritized filling cavernous stadiums with as many everyday fans as possible. For example, the University of Michigan's Michigan Stadium, built in 1927, holds nearly 110,000 people, most of whom sit on hard, backless bleachers. It's an uncomfortable but egalitarian arrangement that creates a sense of community and one of the most electric atmospheres in American sports.
But the business model that enabled the feeling - including relying upon unpaid amateur athletes - is disappearing. Earlier this year, the National Collegiate Athletic Association reached a legal settlement with thousands of players that will allow schools to pay current athletes around $20 million per year starting in 2025 (the parties are awaiting final sign-off by the courts).
For schools such as Northwestern, which has one of the smallest student populations in the Big Ten or SEC, that's around 17% of its $117.6 million athletics budget in 2023. So rather than build its own Michigan Stadium (the third largest in the world ), Northwestern is in the process of replacing its 47,000-seat Ryan Field with a new, $850 million, 35,000-seat stadium. It will be the most expensive college football stadium ever built while also being the smallest stadium in college football's two wealthiest conferences, the Big Ten and SEC.
Part of the goal is to drive up ticket prices and revenue by constraining supply. It appears to work. During this season and the next one, the school's football team, the Wildcats, is playing in a temporary, 12,000-seat pop-up stadium while the new Ryan Field is being built. According to Sports Business Journal, the interim setup has quadrupled the revenues generated by its larger, nearly century-old predecessor.
But those ballooning revenues (and the ticket prices that support them) aren't just about fewer seats. They're the direct result of a decision to double the number of pricey premium seats that were available in the old stadium. As a result, this fall, well-heeled fans had a range of comfortable options beyond metal bleachers, including a turf-level “field loge” comprised of semi-private individual tables and fixed swivel chairs, a club level featuring padded seats under a canopy, and 16-seat partitioned “suites.” Prices for the top tier ran as high as $3,049 this season, and games sold out. (By comparison, in 2023, tickets to the team's home opener averaged a bottom-scraping $17 on the resale market and didn't sell out.)
When the new Ryan Field opens in 2026, it will offer a dozen different seating options, party decks, scoreboard terraces, and - most important - at least four posh clubs that will be marketed to Chicago's business owners. Pat Ryan, Jr., whose family is paying for most of the stadium (and is also the lead developer), recently told Sports Business Journal that the goal is to move the season-ticket base beyond “just Northwestern fans” and expand it to a Chicago business community that values - and is willing to pay for - the kind of premium experience available in an NFL luxury suite.
It's not just Northwestern that's thinking more like an NFL team's business office, either. Across the sport, athletic departments are looking to earn more money from gamedays. In September, for example, the University of Tennessee announced that the price of football season tickets will rise 14.5% in 2025, with a minimum of 10% earmarked for athlete revenue sharing or what it called a “talent fee.” In Ann Arbor, the University of Michigan recently asked fans how they'd feel about a reduction of seating capacity at the stadium and converting areas to higher-end premium seating/space. And around the country, schools are hiking the price of tailgating spaces, putting the pinch on people who like to show their fandom by partying in proximity to a game.
These changes will cost more than dollars and cents. As games become more exclusive, it will be at the expense of the bonds formed over sports watching - particularly among students.
To be sure, they will still be in the stadium; schools typically offer low(er) cost student tickets (though those have been ticking upward in price, too). But if students become the low-revenue outliers in stadiums packed with premium seats, it's fair to wonder how long it'll be before athletic departments view them as unfairly occupying under-valued real estate in a money-making enterprise.
Sure, they provide a college gameday atmosphere. But when there's a payroll to meet, something has to give.
Minter is a Bloomberg View columnist. He is the author of "Junkyard Planet: Travels in the Billion-Dollar Trash Trade."
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