South Bend Tribune, 9/19/2005
A look at how hot tickets were for the 2005 Notre Dame football team’s home opener against Michigan State. I shadowed a group of scalpers as they bought and sold tickets at extraordinary prices.

Need ND Tickets?

By Jeremy D. Bonfiglio
Tribune Staff Writer

SOUTH BEND — Don Barfield can’t buy a ticket.

Any ticket. On the 50-yard line? Pipe dream. In the end zone? Good luck.

Singles, two together? He’ll take anything.

It’s two hours before game time and the Indianapolis man has been looking for a ticket since 8 a.m. Saturday. He’s standing on the corner of Michigan and Pokagon streets just south of the University of Notre Dame campus, holding a cardboard sign that reads “I NEED TICKETS.”

“There was a lot of hype to this one,” Barfield says of the Irish home opener against Michigan State. “You can’t even get a car to stop.”

Barfield is among the dozens of ticket brokers — commonly known as scalpers — who descend on South Bend to buy and resell tickets.

Even he is struggling to find any extras.

Ticket scalping is legal in Indiana. As long as sellers remain 50 feet from the venue and don’t impede traffic, they can buy and resell Notre Dame tickets for any price.

“Every game is different,” says Keith Allen, a ticket scalper from Indianapolis. “But I can tell you they are in pretty high demand right now.”

At 10:30 a.m. traffic is at a standstill just south of the toll road on Indiana 933. State troopers blow whistles and direct cars through a maze of orange cones as they crawl toward campus.

Allen stands along the roadway in the grassy field next to the Inn at Saint Mary’s. He’s working with his two brothers, who did not divulge their names, each holding bright yellow signs with the words “I NEED TICKETS” emblazoned in black marker.

Cars and minivans scoot to the side of the road. Drivers and passengers all ask one question: “How much?”

That depends.

The face value of Notre Dame football tickets is $56 for the general public, $44.83 for staff and faculty sold on a season ticket basis, and $28 for students.

There’s no such thing as face value on 933.

The brothers are working the system of supply and demand: Buying low and selling high.

“The market’s been hovering around $100 to $200 for tickets right now,” Keith Allen says.

Everybody wants a deal and there are few to be had.

“How much?” yells one potential customer caught in the gridiron gridlock. One of the brothers holds up two fingers. $200. And the price is going up.

Two tickets on the 20-yard line? $300 each.

Fifteen yards up the street Allen sells a parking pass for $160.

The brothers, who say they come here without any tickets, have been doing this for about five years now.

One brother yells across the lawn to another who’s been talking to a man in a minivan for close to five minutes — a scalper’s eternity.

“You know, in Indiana, you guys are married after spending all that time talking,” the brother says.

For those who “NEED TICKETS,” it’s close the deal or move along.

There’s some talk of the 145 tickets South Bend Police say were stolen last week from Midwest Cardiovascular Specialists in South Bend.

All were in section 135. None of the scalpers The Tribune spoke to Saturday claimed to see any of them.

“Notre Dame tickets are a hot commodity,” says Sgt. Dominic Zultanski, a South Bend police detective working on the case.

Zultanski says it was the scalpers who helped police track down the alleged thieves.

“They talked to each other and figured out something wasn’t right,” Zultanski says. “Sometimes I think they get a bad name.”

Still, Zultanski says, his stance is to never buy from anyone who can’t guarantee their tickets.

“You have to ask if the guy on the corner is really willing to do that,” he says.

To the fans looking for seats, some chance seems better than none at all.

“To be honest,” Zultanski says. “I think this is all just a warm up for the USC game.”