The 2011 Orange Bowl takes place Monday, Jan. 3 in Miami at Sun Life Stadium, putting Stanford versus Virginia Tech. While it should be an exciting game, there remains some question as to whether a sufficient number of Stanford fans will make the trip to South Florida to enjoy their Cardinal in a BCS bowl.
For those that do plan on making the trip, tickets are readily available across the Internet. Your most basic options are going through the respective universities. You can go to hokietickets.com or Stanford’s website. According to this article, there may be a host of Virginia Tech tickets available for purchase if you can’t find any through Stanford. This year is a slightly better matchup than in year’s past so we’ll see how that goes as the month rolls along.
Additionally, a lot of schools require hefty donations to get access to certain tickets. However, you can also get tickets without going through the particular university, and often times you’ll save money on the face value of the ticket. Some of the more frequently used sites include StubHub and Craigslist. StubHub is much more trustworthy, but both provide numerous opportunities to get access to game tickets.
StubHub
The link above will take you to a search for the Orange Bowl at StubHub. Tickets range in price from $36 to $1,762. The inexpensive options will put you up high in the end zone or corner seats. To get towards the middle of the field but stay relatively inexpensive you want to look for Upper Prime. Tickets there are starting at $55 on StubHub.
To get down into the lower level of the stadium, ticket prices are starting around $80 in lower corner. The upside to the StubHub option is that you can view the various options on a seating chart and know approximately where you’d be seating. You don’t get to see what the view looks like, but you can estimate. Additionally, StubHub does offer electronic delivery for some of their tickets. For this particular game there aren’t a lot of electronic options, but that might increase as the game gets closer.
Craigslist
Craigslist ads for tickets include random people looking to unload tickets and ticket agencies looking to sell tickets. I’d recommend StubHub over Craigslist, but sometimes you can find a good deal on tickets. If you’re going to try Craigslist, the three sites you want to check out are SF Bay Area (can look into more detail by region of the Bay Area), Washington, D.C. (the closest major city to Blacksburg, Va.), and/or Miami/South Florida (given the location of the game).
If I had to pick on site it would be StubHub at this point. They are a generally trustworthy site and they’ve worked out affiliation agreements with a lot of sports teams, both at the professional and amateur level. Scalping is usually illegal and Craigslist could lead to plenty of problems in getting your plans finalized. However, I wanted to make sure and list the various options out there.