The venue for the inaugural Big Ten Championship Game, Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis, has a seating capacity of 63,000 for football games. It appears some of those seats might be vacant when the game kicks off Saturday.
A representative from the Lucas Oil Stadium box office told The Lantern that information regarding Wisconsin and MSU’s allotment of tickets, as well as tickets for the general public, was confidential. However, the secondary market for tickets to the conference’s title clash between Wisconsin and Michigan State is ripe with stubs.
Searches for tickets on the Internet returned plenty of results for would-be ticket buyers.
A Thursday night search for eight tickets on ticketmaster.com, the maximum amount that can be purchased on the website in one transaction, would have allowed a customer to purchase eight tickets all in a row.
Another Thursday night search for tickets to the title game on stubhub.com showed 2,848 tickets available tickets ranging in price from $14 to $17,648.
Wisconsin coach Bret Bielema said Badgers students didn’t waste any time buying up tickets for the title game and exhausted their allotment in a matter of minutes.
“I was excited to hear about the students (Monday) selling out 2,000 tickets in eight minutes,” Bielema said. “That shows at least the students are excited to get over there and see what happens.”
MSU announced Nov. 21 that its ticket allotment of 15,450 tickets were sold as well.
Bielema also said it’s possible that Wisconsin fans will be outnumbered by Michigan State fans.
“You obviously have to be prepared for crowd noise, because you don’t know what the split’s going to be,” he said. “Michigan State knew a week longer than we did that they were going to be playing in a game, so they might’ve had a little jump on tickets.”
Spartan Stadium in East Lansing, Mich., is separated from Lucas Oil Stadium by approximately 255 miles while the trip from Madison, Wis., to the venue of Saturday’s game is approximately 331 miles.
OSU played both MSU and Wisconsin this season, losing to the Spartans, 10-7, on Oct. 1 before upsetting the then-No. 12-ranked Badgers, 33-29, Oct. 29. OSU lost three consecutive games against Purdue, Penn State and Michigan to fall out of contention for a berth to the Big Ten title .
The Big Ten Championship game kicks off at 8:17 p.m. and will be televised nationally on FOX.
