Tickets for Sunday's Patriots-Broncos AFC Championship game sold out "minutes after they went on sale" yesterday via Ticketmaster, so odds "were slim anyone would luck out and get seats," according to Reid Cherner of USA TODAY. Anyone not living in Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, Wyoming, Nebraska, Montana, South Dakota or western Kansas was "blocked from getting seats for the game in Denver." Broncos Exec Dir of Media Relations Patrick Smyth said, "We had extremely limited inventory, and we wanted to make sure our local fans had an opportunity to purchase those tickets." He added that 96% of season ticketholders "chose to get playoff tickets, leaving 2,800 tickets for Monday's sale." Smyth also noted that Broncos playoff tickets have been "limited to mountain-region residents" since '05 (USA TODAY, 1/14). Meanwhile, in Seattle, Erik Lacitis writes the Seahawks "by restricting out-of-state ticket sales to billing addresses in Oregon, Montana, Idaho, Alaska, Hawaii and the Canadian provinces of British Columbia and Alberta ... were doing the same thing" for Sunday's NFC Championship game. The few thousand tickets released yesterday by the Seahawks "were sold out within 30 minutes." However, it is not as if 49ers fans "have been shut out," as tickets "are available on the 'secondary market'" (SEATTLE TIMES, 1/14). ESPN's Keith Olbermann said, "I get the desire to keep the home crowd home and maintain the purity of the Seattle 12th Man. But of course in reality, all the Seahawks are doing here is ... driving people to ticket resellers and scalpers and thus making the NFL experience even more costly for real fans. Good work" ("Olbermann," ESPN2, 1/13). The N.Y. Daily News' Bob Raissman said the "thing that does surprise me is it's probably legal because the NFL checks all this stuff out." Raissman: "I wouldn't be surprised if someone sues over this" ("Daily News Live," SNY, 1/13).
MARKET MARKUP: In S.F., Kale Williams notes yesterday roughly 6,000 tickets for the 49ers-Seahawks game were found on ticket aggregator SeatGeek "for an average of $680." SeatGeek Communications Analyst Connor Gregoire said that that figure was "the highest price outside of a Super Bowl" since '10. The ticket search engine also reported that more than 40% of traffic to the entire site early yesterday was "coming from Californians looking for tickets to the game," with another 30% "coming from Washington" (S.F. CHRONICLE, 1/14).
WHATEVER WORKS: 49ers coach Jim Harbaugh said of the Seahawks' ticket policy, "I actually respect it -- what you're trying to do for your team, put them in the best possible position to win. I respect that their organization does that for their team. I think they do that in a lot of ways." Ticket reseller StubHub said that more than 30% of sales for 49ers-Seahawks are "coming from California" with 28% from Washington (S.F. CHRONICLE, 1/14). PRO FOOTBALL TALK's Mike Florio notes despite "plenty of complaints from 49ers fans and Patriots fans who wanted to buy tickets at face value but couldn’t because of where they reside, the practice is permitted by league rules." The NFL said that there is "no league policy on the issue, and that the NFL has determined that the practice gives rise to no legal issues" (PROFOOTBALLTALK.com, 1/14).
