Is Notre Dame Phasing Out the Common Fan?

Slowly but surely, Notre Dame is phasing out the common fan.

If you even remotely follow Notre Dame football, you’ll at least know that it costs at least an arm and a leg (sometimes more than that) to attend a game at Notre Dame Stadium. Over the past 20 or so years, ticket prices have slowly, but surely been rising. This season things may be getting out of hand.

Like most teams and programs, the Irish use a tiered pricing system for their football tickets. This means that the lesser games cost less and the high profiled matchups are priced through the roof. Tyler James of the South Bend Tribune recently wrote a great article about the price of Notre Dame football tickets. For those of you who have not read it, he talks about the prices of tickets this season and why Notre Dame decided to price those games that certain way. He also talked to select few of Notre Dame fans to get their read on the football ticket situation. I won’t go into the specifics, but if you want to read the article yourself its right here.

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I mostly want to discuss that Notre Dame is slowly phasing out the common fan. For example, if you want to buy one ticket to each game this season it will end up costing you $670 for the whole lot, with the Michigan State and Miami games costing $150 a piece. The Stanford game will cost $125. The Duke and Virginia Tech games will cost $85 and Nevada will cost $75. I can remember a time when a ticket to the USC game would cost just a little over 50 bucks. I still have my ticket from the 2005 SC game and I think it cost around 55-58 bucks. If you read James’ article we’re already starting to see long-time season ticket holders stop renewing their tickets. The ticket prices are starting to get a little ridiculous.

While personally I have not missed a home game since 2001, this upcoming season is the first season that I have to fund my own tickets (I’m finally being cutoff by my old man). Luckily for myself I have absolutely no overhead, so I can splurge a little bit. But if you think about the average ND fan, most likely it’s going to be someone who has kids and family and spending 75-150 bucks on one ticket, let alone three or four, is probably something you’re not going to do.

Where does it stop if you are Notre Dame? This season your high profile games cost $150, but what about 5-10 years down the road? Will it cost half a grand to get into the stadium? If that starts happening you’re going to start seeing a more country club-like atmosphere in Notre Dame Stadium rather than a intimidating snake-pit type of place. I’m realistic and money will always rule, but I hope that Notre Dame will get to a point where it will become a little bit more affordable for all types of fans to go to games.

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