We continue our series on surviving the Rose Bowl with a tutorial on scoring game tickets. The FishDuck.com resident Rose Bowl expert, Farkquar “Fuzzy” Quackenbush, has been bouncing off the ceiling all morning after receiving notification that his ticket order has been filled by the Duck ticket office. Although he doesn’t know his exact seat location, he realizes he will be sitting in the end zone nosebleed heaven.
As of this writing, Ticketmaster lists a few seats remaining on its website, but many Oregon fans will opt to spend more to purchase seats on the secondary market. There are three secondary market options: resale vendors, resale by ticket holders and scalpers.
StubHub is University of Oregon’s authorized reseller, but there are many other vendors out there. Fuzzy has found the StubHub process to be fairly simple: pick your seats, enter your credit card information and either print your ducats at home or impatiently await the postal carrier. There are many theories on whether to buy early or wait, but ticket prices fluctuate according to demand. With a glut of tickets on the market, prices will trend down. Conventional wisdom says that will be the case this year, but there’s always a risk involved. Right now, StubHub lists 7,500 Rose Bowl tickets available, ranging in price from $188 to a couple grand. Fuzzy recommends that you do not make a “zone purchase,” purchasing tickets in a particular section or block of sections without knowing the exact seat or row number. SeatGeek is handy for checking all the main resale vendors at one time and tracking price trends.
Fans can purchase tickets from the original ticket holders through Craigslist or Ebay. Fuzzy prefers Ebay and pays with Pay Pal which affords a bit more protection if he gets stuck with a counterfeit ticket. Before purchasing tickets, use a Rose Bowl seating map to determine exact seat locations. Remember that in the Rose Bowl, bleachers are in the end zones and the seats between the 20 yards lines have theater backs. If you purchase from Craigslist, the usual cautions apply: meet the person in a public place, don’t carry extra cash and if the deal smells cheesy, walk away.
Ticket Scalpers
The final option is to buy from a scalper on game day. You’ll find scalpers just outside of the stadium, waving handfuls of tickets. A couple of tricks: eliminate the middleman, arrive early and walk through the parking lot asking if anyone has tickets for sale; if you do buy from a scalper, realize that negotiating is the norm and these guys are experts; show them the money, just what you’re willing to pay, not what they’re asking and be willing to walk away if you don’t like the deal. If this is your first go round, stand back a while and watch others dicker with the scalper.
Good luck with your ticket search. In our next article we’ll talk about what to do in Los Angeles while waiting for game day.
Top Photo by Daily Emerald
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Raised in the Central Oregon mill town of Prineville beneath deep blue skies and rim rock, I attended the University of Oregon and during my collegiate summers, I worked in a lumber mill and also fought range fires on the Oregon High Desert for the Bureau of Land Management. After graduating from college at the University of Oregon, I swung from being budding hippy to cop work. I’m still wondering about how that came about. I was a police officer with the Port of Portland and after leaving police work, I obtained an MFA degree in Creative Writing from Vermont College. I live in Portland, Oregon with my wife, my daughter and a spunky bichon frise named Pumpkin. I’ve had short stories publishing in two Main Street Press anthologies. Harkness is my first novel.