It won’t be cheap to get into the last college football game of the season.
The least expensive seat for the College Football Playoff National Championship next Monday is going for almost $2,000.
The game pits Georgia against Alabama, which is making its third straight appearance in the final. It won in 2016.
After Monday night’s semifinals, there was so much interest from ticket buyers that StubHub crashed for about 20 minutes.
On Tuesday afternoon, the cheapest ticket for Georgia-Alabama was going for $1,894 on TicketCity, $2,090 on StubHub and $2,175 on TicketIQ. That’s the highest ticket price for the college title game that TicketIQ has seen since it began tracking in 2011.
Most of the traffic is coming from potential buyers in Georgia, which makes sense: Not only is Georgia in the final, but the game will be played in Atlanta at Mercedes-Benz Stadium.
TicketIQ says prices and interest are up in part because the two schools are so close to the site — an average of 136 miles away.
In the first three years of college football’s playoff system, the championship game was a lot farther from the schools whose teams were competing. In 2016, for example, Clemson and Alabama met in Glendale, Arizona, and prices fell below $300.
Alabama has won four titles in seven years. Georgia hasn’t been a national champion since the 1980 season — well before college football switched to a four-team playoff. The team was voted a consensus champion in national polls, which were recognized at the time.