The New Way to Sell NCAA Football Tickets Like a Pro (2024)
Written by
Patrick Dilworth
Welcome to the 2024 NCAA Football Season
It’s an exciting time of the year for College Football season ticket holders, with conference re-alignments and a new class of recruits bringing excitement to conferences across the country. With an expanded playoff, it’s anyone’s game this season. How does this impact how to sell college football tickets?
The talent level across College Football has exploded, making every night interesting to watch. NIL and the transfer portal have brought College Football to the forefront of the sports world.
Table of Contents
Key Dates for the College Football Season
When does the NCAA Football schedule come out?
College Football ticket resale kicks off with your school’s schedule release, which happens between December 2023 and March 2024. Try to sell NCAA Football tickets close to this date!
When does the NCAAF season start?
College Football kicks off on Saturday August 24th, 2024. Here are some key dates for this season:
08/24/24: Week 0 Begins
08/29/24: Week 1 Begins
11/30/24: Regular Season Ends
12/7/24: Conference Championship Day
12/20/24: CFP Begins
01/20/25: CFP National Championship
It’s essential to sell NCAA Football tickets as close to the schedule release as you can. Any sales that you lock in before the season starts are a nice hedge against the team performing poorly and the resale value dropping by 50% or more.
The Best Ways to Sell NCAA Football Tickets
List as soon as tickets enter your account
It’s a seller’s market.
Early buyers will pay more.
No impact from player injuries.
Fan excitement peaks.
Most of your time should be spent on and around schedule release day. Try to plan out the games you plan to attend immediately and list everything else.
The NCAA is doing all the work to make sure everything is exciting about the next season, so we recommend you catch the wave of volume before it slows down.
If you’re a season ticket holder, we go into more detail in this below. In addition to listing with TiqAssist, which lists seats on 10+ marketplaces and guarantees the sale of tickets, scroll down for our top tips to sell NCAA Football season tickets.
How to Resell College Football Tickets on a Resale Marketplace
Look at Similar Seats
You can price check your NCAA Football tickets by finding listings that are:
1) Similar or closer in distance to midfield
2) Five rows behind you or closer to the field
If you have seats near the home bench, look at seats on the home side of the field. The same goes for visitor-side seats. Seats on the side of the field with the player’s benches carry a slight premium, so don’t compare those seats to seats on the other side of the stadium.
Find the cheapest seats that meet the above criteria, then price above or below based on the below information.
Bundle 3+ seats together and get a premium.
It’s harder to find three or more seats together relative to a pair, so buyers need to generally pay a premium of 10-15% for three seats together. If you can sell five or six seats, you might sell College Football tickets for as much as a 30% premium over a pair. Buyers looking for that many seats typically plan ahead, which means buying when prices are higher in the life cycle of a ticket.
If you have three or more seats and can’t find comparable seats to price against, consider looking at a comparable pair of seats and pricing 15-30% above that pair.
Compare the Ticket Marketplace Prices
Ticketmaster, Stubhub, SeatGeek, and other marketplaces can have wildly different prices. Sometimes one marketplace doesn’t have much supply on-hand, which can lead to unrealistically high prices.
The marketplace with the higher number of listings for your team is likely to be a better proxy of what the true market value of the tickets.
The Factors that Impact College Football Ticket Prices
It’s important to note that ticket prices are far more likely to drop over time than rise. An injury, snowstorm, or losing streak can tank value far more than out-performing expectations can raise it
Watch out for these factors, and you will be able to predict the price direction of tickets with much greater accuracy. We sort out these factors into negatives and positives. The negative factors can drive the price down, so you should likely price your tickets lower preemptively to get a sale before further selling pressure kicks in. On the opposite side, the positives are great for the price.
Negatives:
Selling within one month of the game. The closer the game, the lower the prices will be in general
Bad weather, particularly late-season games in areas where snow is prevalent
The home team is underperforming compared to preseason expectations
The away team is underperforming compared to the preseason expectations
Key injuries to either the home team or the visiting team
Low-resale value opponents
Low-performing, minimal legacy, doesn’t draw well on the road
Games that conflict with high-profile professional games
Games that conflict with major university events
Positives:
Selling more than one month from the game. The further away from the game, the more you can sell your tickets for in general
The home team is performing significantly better than expected going into the season
Opponent is performing significantly better than the expectation going into the season
Great resale value opponents
Either they are a legacy team, high profile conference opponent, have high projected draft picks, superstars, a deep fanbase, or are a championship contender
The main takeaway here is that you should sell NCAA Football tickets as soon as you can. Ticket factors like ‘great resale value opponents’ aren’t going to change throughout the College Football season. A team’s health and performance and the gameday weather are subject to change and can potentially tank how much you can sell NCAA football tickets for.
How do Conference Re-alignments Impact Ticket Prices?
With NCAAF conferences re-aligning, the top resale opponents in each conference are shifting. New high-value opponents are now on the schedule for schools that have never faced off before. Here are the expected highest-value opponents in each top conference this season:
Owning season tickets is a lot of work. Most NCAA Football season ticket holders can’t make it out to all the home games on the schedule. In addition to listing with TiqAssist, which lists seats on 10+ marketplaces and guarantees the sale of tickets, here are some of our top tips to sell NCAA Football season tickets:
List Season Tickets on “Release Day” of your team’s Schedule
Following this advice will help you maximize the price you can get for your tickets.
List your tickets as far out from the event as possible. On schedule release day, there will be significantly higher buyer volume which will allow for higher season ticket pricing. There will be plenty of die-hard fans or planners who want the certainty of having the tickets in hand, particularly for the hottest games of the year.
You’ll get a premium over the others who have tickets but haven’t gotten around to listing their tickets or are waiting until closer to the game when they know whether they can attend or not. That means at the schedule release, there’s extremely limited supply and very high demand, which leads to a seller’s market.
Additionally, you want to avoid negative factors that may come up and impact ticket pricing. For example, player injuries that happen on either the home team or the visiting team. Whether it’s a superstar that is injured or resting, that could reduce the value of the ticket in half or more.
If you are unable to list around the schedule release, we recommend selling at least five weeks in advance of the game. Why? Most sellers list one to four weeks before the game, so you’ll want to get out in front of these sellers before they flood the market with inventory.
Also, sellers start feeling the time crunch as the game nears, at which point it’s a race to the bottom as sellers undercut each other.
List early games and low-resale value opponents first
The earlier games typically see less hype, so you may want to consider listing these tickets lower than normal as these games have less buyer demand. If you know you are unlikely to attend these games, best to get out ahead of the falling prices and sell early.
Pay off your payment plan as soon as possible.
While a 0% interest payment plan seems great on the surface, you can’t list tickets that are not paid in full. Delaying reselling your listings can cost you significantly in the end via the lower resale prices that you are likely to encounter as the game nears.
The New Way to Manage College Football Season Tickets
As exciting as NCAA Football is right now, we know most season ticket holders can’t make it out to all the home games on the schedule, so selling tickets through resale marketplaces is a necessity. That’s understandable – whether it’s weekday games that end too late at night, weekend commitments, or you need to resell the most valuable games to finance your season ticket investment.
Built for Sports Fans, By Sports Fans.
If you ever thought to yourself, “why do I spend so much time managing my tickets? Why isn’t there a solution for this?”
We thought the same thing, so we made TiqAssist.
We handle the process of unloading your unused seats and provide you with the best return on your sales. When you choose to work with us, you’ll enjoy a wide range of benefits that make NCAA Basketball season ticket resale fast, easy, and successful for you.
Your tickets reach 5x the potential buyers through simultaneous listing on Ticketmaster, StubHub, Seatgeek, VividSeats, Gametime, TickPick, and other exchanges. No accidental double-selling of tickets. No marketplace sells more than 20% of our tickets, underscoring how important it is to list on all the top marketplaces. Your ticket prices are automatically updated to sell for the highest price possible and you get a bird’s eye view with a dashboard of all your ticket listings in one place.
We use technology that prices your tickets based on real-time data, providing you with the most accurate price based on current demand level and many other factors. Our ticketing software keeps your prices competitive with others but still ensures you get the most from the sale. It takes into consideration seat quality, time of year, popularity of the visiting team, and other conditions, so you always get more money than you would if you tried to sell the tickets yourself. On average, users earn 10-15% more using TiqAssist than they would by handling the sale on their own.
On top of all this, TiqAssist guarantees that your ticket will sell. So you can have complete peace of mind and never lose out over tickets.
Built for sports fans, by sports fans, we want you to spend less time on your tickets and more time enjoying the game along with us!
Learn more about selling NCAA season tickets for your favorite teams: Click here
Summary
Reselling NCAA Football tickets has become more challenging as more marketplaces flood the resale market. Your best shot at success is listing as far in advance as possible and following our pricing tips above.
These tips were written by our selling experts. Follow us on social media to get more up-to-date information and the latest tips to give you an edge when selling tickets.
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If you enjoyed this article, you’ll love having TiqAssist’s selling experts and technology fully manage your ticket resale for you. Just click “List” for any game on your personalized dashboard and you’re done!
To learn more about best practices around ticket resale and the top ticket resale marketplaces, read our blog article on “How to resell tickets online.“
Learn more about how to sell NCAA Football tickets for your favorite teams here.
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