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Mike Lope won't be at Spartan Stadium on Saturday when Michigan State University's football team plays Ohio State University. But his tickets might be.
He's posted four tickets for sale on Craigslist. The asking price: $150 apiece.
Reselling tickets for more than their face value is illegal in Michigan. It's also awfully common, especially in the run-up to big games.
This week, there have been hundreds of offers on Web sites such as Craigslist, eBay, StubHub and ExchangeHut, with prices going as high as $400 a ticket. The box office price of non-student tickets is $70, and student tickets are cheaper.
The game is a sellout.
"When I was a student there, I used to sell student tickets for big games ... for a bunch of money, but we haven't sold tickets since I graduated eight years ago," said Lope, who lives in Bloomfield Township.
This year, though, the game conflicts with an annual golf outing he takes with his friends.
"I heard that it's supposed to be one of the biggest crowds in the history of the stadium, so the more the merrier the way I see it," he said. "I'm definitely doing background checks, though. No Ohio State fans."
The matchup carries a special significance this year. Both 20th-ranked MSU and 12th-ranked Ohio State are undefeated in Big Ten play.
"I've been looking forward to this game since the beginning of the year because I knew that Ohio State always has a good team," MSU senior Adam Piotrowski said.
He thought his parents would want to see it, too, so he bought two lower bowl tickets off Craigslist for $130. But his parents won't be able to make the trip from Saginaw, so he put the tickets back on Craigslist.
"The only thing left to do is sell them back for what I got them for," he said.
Nathan Lustig is the general manager of ExchangeHut, a student-to-student ticket sale Web site which handles about 15,000 ticket transactions a year, mostly from the University of Wisconsin, University of Michigan, Michigan State and Penn State.
Lustig said the company doesn't run afoul of scalping laws because it is not actually selling tickets.
"We're just setting up buyers and sellers," he said, "and they should obey whatever local scalping laws there are."
MSU police inspector Kelly Beck said there's also an ordinance that prohibits people from selling anything on campus without a permit, effectively prohibiting face-to-face sales.
But, as to whether the MSU police would track down individuals selling tickets over the Internet, "We're a little busy with our other crime right now," she said.
