By Mike Lopresti
Gannett News Service

Maybe we'd all better sit down. Today's subject is the price of a Super Bowl ticket. Or there might be a better word for it: ransom.

Another Super Bowl, another case of sticker shock. The NFL list price for most of the seats at XXXVIII is $500.

Not that they had trouble selling them all. Which just goes to show you the world is full of CEOs, real estate tycoons and oil sheiks, some of them apparently willing to use public stadium restrooms for one Sunday evening a year.

Price gouging in and around the Super Bowl is as traditional as the nacho dip. But one wonders how high is up. For the previous Super Bowl in Houston, 30 years ago, tickets went for $15. Nine years ago, they were $200. They have gone up 150 percent since then, riding along with college tuition and emergency room visits.

At that rate, by Super Bowl XLV (45, for the Roman numeral-challenged), they will hit $1,000. The halftime show better be good.

Feel free to ponder the trials of a struggling economy as you turn on the television Feb. 1 and see a stadium full of 70,000 people who paid $500 to get in.

We got a deep thinker on the phone from Northeastern University to explain it.

"The Super Bowl is still a market economy. They wouldn't ask for that kind of money if they didn't think they could get it," said Peter Roby, director of the Center for Study of Sport in Society. "It's not a game they expect the majority of the fans to be the average fan. It's just not anymore.

"You've got to be kind of the chosen ones to get there. Or have a boatload of money."

Apparently, the Super Bowl has become the sports equivalent of the film festival at Cannes or the slopes at Vail.

"A market phenomenon," Roby called it.

You want normal football? That's four plumbers grilling brats in the parking lot.

You want the Super Bowl? That's XXX in Tempe, Ariz., where stadium officials had to hunt down an empty office for a Saudi Arabian prince to use as his praying room.

Nothing wrong with that. Except for this: Remember the huddled masses in New England at that night playoff game, putting on their blankets and coats, looking as if they were doing a study of penguin migration in Antarctica?

They came, they cheered for their Patriots, they nearly contracted frostbite. But they'd need warm water immersion before they stayed home and watched it on TV. You can't torment Steve McNair or Peyton Manning from your La-Z-Boy.

But here comes the Super Bowl, and who will be in the stands watching their team? Insurance executives from Santa Monica, board directors from Central Park West, VIPs who couldn't pick Tom Brady out of a police lineup.

No wonder regular Joes are willing to flirt with lunacy in those radio promotions asking what anyone would do for Super Bowl tickets. One year, a guy in Illinois ate a $100 bill. Someone in Phoenix threw himself into a pickup truck of manure.

And where might the ticket price go? Do we need a calculator?

"I don't think it's going too much higher than it is right now," Roby said. "What's going to continue to go up is the cost of a 30-second commercial spot, or the cost of sponsorship in the game. But you get to a point of, when is enough enough?

"They have to be somewhat careful about the public relations impact. If they get much above where they are right now, they open themselves up to charges that it is insane and unfair."

Insane? The Super Bowl? Perish the thought.

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Mike Lopresti is a columnist for Gannett News Service.

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