BY DANIEL VICTOR
Of The Patriot-News
At 12:53 p.m. Wednesday, I text messaged the recent Middletown Area High School graduate who had advertised a student ticket to Saturday’s Penn State-Notre Dame game for sale on Facebook.
“$100 for ND ticket?” I thumbed on my cell phone. The face value for her ticket is $25.
“Who’s this?” she responded moments later.
“Saw your ad on Facebook. My name’s Dan Victor , and I live in Harrisburg.”
“Oh ok. I already sold it for 300.”
The resellers have a significant interest in making sure we think there’s an absurd secondary ticket market. That’s how they con desperate fans into shelling out $300 for a single ticket, even though the prices keep dipping as we approach kickoff.
Tasked this week with finding tickets for myself and several of my recent PSU alumni friends, I can offer this piece of advice: Don’t jump the gun when scouring the Internet for tickets to big games.
That Middletown alumna text messaged me again three hours later.
“You still want that ticket?” she wrote.
“Yes but for no more than 100,” I responded.
“150,” she countered.
I didn’t take it. I had strict directives from my friends – Ben, Jess and I set our ceilings at $100. Dan doesn’t want to spend more than $125. Andy and Megan wouldn’t go higher than $175 for a pair.
But Erin Grady was looking for four tickets, preferably in pairs, and could go as high as $200 apiece.
I found an ad on State College’s Craigs-list that offered two seats for $200 apiece. With Grady in mind, I e-mailed him an offer of $150 apiece.
Just 26 minutes later, he e-mailed me with his new demand: $170. He had spent $350 apiece for the pair and wanted to recoup at least the price of one of the tickets, he said.
I called Grady. “I’ll take them!” she responded immediately.
She might have been wise to get tickets when she could.
While the rest of my friends will be crossing their fingers for cheap (and non-counterfeit) tickets hours before kickoff, she’s assured entrance if the tickets are legit. That’s worth some kind of premium.
But Mike Pries, a class of 1994 alumnus and Derry Twp. supervisor, said he routinely scores tickets to the biggest games by waiting until the last possible minute.
People with extra tickets don’t want to miss any of the game, and some scalpers will take whatever they can get if no one bit on their high prices, he said.
“I’m going to be one of those guys hanging out right around 6, maybe even 10 after 6, maybe right after kickoff,” he said. “Those tickets, they fall to the price that I’d like to pay for them.”
Tyrone Parham, Penn State’s assistant director of police operations, said day-of-event buyers need to be wary of counterfeit tickets. Some buyers ask to see
the driver’s license of the seller or take the person’s picture.
Other big games usually produce about 20 scalping arrests, which for a first offender comes with a summary citation and a fine of up to $300. There will be “significantly more” plain-clothes officers this weekend, he said.
As for me, I had resigned myself to take my stab
at the outside-the-stadium approach. The major Web sites weren’t worth my time – ticket auctions on eBay were routinely won for over $200 apiece. All the other options, from The Patriot-News classified ads to Penn State’s own TicketExchange, were no better.
Becoming slightly irritated with the online sellers, I was in no mood to
see this in an ad on Harrisburg’s Craigslist: “DO NOT SEND ME UNREASONABLE OFFERS I WILL NOT REPLY.”
Really? He dared invoke the word “reasonable”?
“In that case, my offer is for face value,” I wrote to him. “That’s as ‘reasonable’ as it comes, don’t you think?”
I didn’t receive a pleasant response.
Luckily, a co-worker came through. When he heard I was looking for tickets, he called up a friend, who happened to live on the same street where I grew up and who knew my parents. When that man heard I needed a ticket, he offered it up – for face value.
I felt unreasonably lucky.