Tickets offered to Orange Club donors through Syracuse University for the Sweet 16 of the NCAA Tournament sold out Tuesday.

Members of the club were eligible to purchase ticket packages for the three games of the Sweet 16, which start Thursday. 

Ticket sales began for members at the director’s level, $5,000 or higher, March 17 and concluded Monday at noon, said Jeremiah Maher, associate athletics director for ticket operations, in an email.

‘After that sale, we had a limited number of tickets available at noon today to donors at the $4,999 and below, and men’s basketball season ticket holders,’ Maher said in an email. ‘Those tickets sold out within one hour of being on sale today.’

Maher said if there were any remaining tickets after this sale, they would have been made available to the general public Wednesday.

Although the donor tickets sold out quickly, tickets only available for student season ticket holders went on sale Tuesday at the Carrier Dome Box Office from 8:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. These tickets did not sell out, Maher said.

The men’s basketball team will hold an open practice in the TD Garden in Boston on Wednesday. Maher said it is open to anyone, and fans who might not have game tickets but want to see the team usually attend.

‘It is a great opportunity to see the teams up close and personal,’ Maher said.

Tickets for the upcoming tournament round have not only been selling quickly at SU, but at other ticket retailers as well, and for high prices. Myles Kaufman, data analyst at the ticket search engine and listing site SeatGeek, said the tickets selling for the games in Boston are 38 percent more expensive than the next most expensive Sweet 16 location, in Phoenix, Ariz.

Analysts at SeatGeek use compiled ticket sales data from about 60 different ticket retailing sites to compare the costs and find users the best deals. Because data is collected, Kaufman said the analysts can determine who is buying tickets for which events and how the prices are affected and changed.

‘When we looked at the NCAA Regionals for this week we found that tickets for the Boston Regional are going for way more than every other site,’ he said.

He said in an email that all-session tickets for the Sweet 16 and Elite Eight games in Boston, Phoenix, St. Louis and Atlanta are averaging at $367. Tickets for the games in Boston are bringing that average up substantially, with the average ticket price of $508. The next most expensive package is for the games in Phoenix with an average of $366.

Demand for tickets in Boston is high, Kaufman said, so the average price for a ticket to the Elite Eight in Boston, $315, is almost as expensive as the average price for an entire all-session strip in Atlanta, which costs $330.

This large price discrepancy between locations can be due to several factors, including the distance a school is to the site of the games and the availability of the tickets, Kaufman said.

Since Syracuse is relatively close to Boston compared to the distances other schools are from the location of their schools’ games, ‘Syracuse fans might want to buy tickets and make the trek,’ Kaufman said.

Kaufman also said tickets to games at the TD Garden may be more expensive because the seats are in higher demand. This is due to the fact that it is one of the smallest venues out of the four Sweet 16 sites, two of which are larger football stadiums.

The TD Garden holds about 18,000 people for basketball. The Georgia Dome in Atlanta, where the Falcons play, holds 26,000 people for basketball, which is an 8,000 person difference, Kaufman said.

During the past 72 hours, Kaufman said, ticket seekers from New York state have made up 20 percent of all traffic data to SeatGeek, coming in only behind Massachusetts at 29 percent.

Said Kaufman: ‘What makes that 20 percent figure really amazing is that two of the teams playing in the Boston Regional are from Ohio (Cincinnati and Ohio State), which accounted for a mere 7 percent of traffic for those tickets over the past three days.’

rebarill@syr.edu 

Published on March 20, 2012 at 12:00 pm