DAILY DIRT: Think you might want to go to Super Bowl? Better have six figures ready for a ticket

Those tickets have a come a long way since that $12 charge for the first Super Bowl … Welcome to today’s three thoughts that make up Vol. 854 of The Daily Dirt.

1. So you would like to go the Super Bowl, eh?

“The Super Bowl, it’s like a different beast,” Chris Leyden, director of growth marketing at SeatGeek, told USA TODAY Sports this week. “It’s going to be really in demand.”

That, as they say, might be an understatement.

Tickets for Super Bowl LVIII (58), scheduled for Feb. 11 in Las Vegas, are already at historic levels. Average prices on the secondary market this week have been ranging from $9,800 to more than $12,000, according to Seat Geek and TickPick. That’s 70 percent more expensive than just last year.

Here’s what the average ticket currently costs for this year’s and the five preceding Super Bowls, per SeatGeek:

• Super Bowl 58: $12,082 (Allegiant Stadium, Las Vegas — San Francisco 49ers vs. Kansas City Chiefs).
• Super Bowl 57: $8,907 (State Farm Stadium, Glendale, Arizona — Kansas City Chiefs vs. Philadelphia Eagles).
• Super Bowl 56: $10,322 (SoFi Stadium, Inglewood, California — Los Angeles Rams vs. Cincinnati Bengals).
• Super Bowl 55: $11,840 (Raymond James Stadium, Tampa, Florida — Tampa Bay Buccaneers vs. Kansas City Chiefs).
• Super Bowl 54: $6,569 (Hard Rock Stadium, Miami Gardens, Florida — Kansas City Chiefs vs. San Francisco 49ers).
• Super Bowl 53: $5,329 (Mercedes-Benz Stadium, Atlanta — New England Patriots vs. Los Angeles Rams)

Here are some other notes concerning Super Bowl tickets you might find interesting:

• Super Bowl tickets back in the 1970s didn’t cost as much as a used car. Frankly, it wasn’t even close. Tickets to the first Super Bowl (though it wasn’t called that then) were $12 apiece, which adjusted for inflation would equal about $106 today.
• The average price didn’t top $40 until the mid-’80s, and didn’t break the $100 barrier until 1988. Even adjusted for inflation, that would cost fans today an average of under $250, a “minor” wallet dent compared to today’s ballooning costs.– 
• In the 1990s, the league really began ramping up the glitz and glamor factor, according to profootballnetwork.com. Earlier halftime performances of marching bands and Disney characters gave way to Gloria Estefan and Michael Jackson, and prices began to skyrocket.
• By 1995, the average price had doubled in just seven years to $200 ($374 inflation adj.), which then doubled again in another seven years to $400 ($635 inflation adj.) in 2002.
• In 2009, the average Super Bowl ticket price finally shattered the $1,000 mark, and it wasn’t slowing down. It took just six more years to reach $1,500 in 2015, and by the later 2010s, it jumped by the thousands.
• The average price in 2019, depending on which purchasing platform you look at, reached as high as $4,300. In 2020, it nearly doubled to more than $7,100.
• One final note about the Super Bowl tickets: Those ticket prices do not include travel, lodging or eating costs while there, which in many cases will (at least) equal the price of a the ticket alone.

2. Here’s this week’s favorites that were “Found on Facebook”:

• “We do not have WiFi. Talk to each other, Pretend it’s 1995.”
• “Preschool rules and bar rules are the same. You pee your pants, you go home.”
• “Everything happens for a reason. Sometimes that reason is you’re stupid and make bad decisions.”
• “You just made me laugh so hard that tears ran down my leg.”
• “When you come from the era of the Beatles, Pink Floyd, James Brown and Led Zeppelin, it’s hard to get excited about Ed Sheeran, Kanye and Justin Bieber.”

3. Our medal-winners held steady in the fourth week of January as the Great Plate Debate of 2024 begins to find some footing:

Gold medal: DA LIFE. 

Silver medal: 2 FARR.

Bronze medal: NUFSED 9.

Here are some of the top plates we spotted in West-Central and Northeast Missouri that did not make the final cut, but deserved a tip o’ the hat:

• CYBR
• HOOK EM 6
• TRACZ 1
• MED PEDS
• BURF 46
• MRS D
• 1 ND AD
• MIXER 4
• AIRB
• TRIDI

Steve Thought O’ The Day — I’d like to pretend it’s 1995 for another reason. I’d only be in my mid-40s.

Steve Eighinger writes daily for Muddy River News. When our publisher went to Super Bowl XXIV in New Orleans, the ticket was $125. That was 1990.