College Football Playoff: Tickets near $4,000 apiece in hours before Notre Dame-Ohio State kickoff

ATLANTA — Perhaps Ohio State and Notre Dame fans skipped the early-round College Football Playoff games to save up for this moment. Judging from the secondary-market offerings in the hours before kickoff, they were hopefully saving for quite some time in advance of this game.

Where secondary ticket prices for some CFP games dipped to sub-$20 levels in the hours before kickoff, prices remained far higher for the national championship. Three hours before kickoff, the get-in-the-door price for tickets to Ohio State-Notre Dame hovered around $4,000, with Stubhub registering a low price of $3,934 and Ticketmaster clocking in at $4,401, both for tickets in the upper reaches of Mercedes-Benz Stadium.

The vast discrepancy between ticket prices for the semifinals and those for the championship game, all played in NFL stadiums, will likely contribute to an ongoing impetus to move more playoff games onto campuses. All four first-round on-campus games — in Columbus, State College, Austin and South Bend — were enthusiastic sellouts.

At the same time, it's a tough ask to get fans to pay for tickets and travel to four different sites over the course of a month. Notre Dame and Ohio State have each clocked more than 4,000 miles in air travel jetting from home to NFL stadiums all over the country.