USC-Notre Dame tickets are scarce, expensive

So, you’re not a big-time USC athletics donor and you still need tickets to Saturday’s USC-Notre Dame game at the Coliseum for less than the down payment on a luxury SUV?

Steve Lopes has three words for you: “There aren’t any.”

Lopes, the USC senior associate athletic director who oversees ticket operations, said the school has only a handful of tickets left -- and they are reserved for athletics donors with last-minute needs.

Fighting Irish fans don’t have it any better. Notre Dame officials say this game is the most-requested road game in school history. Josh Berlo, director of ticket operations, said his office fielded 33,251 requests -- and that’s only from the alumni and benefactors who participated in a ticket lottery last summer.

With three days to go, the game is already the No. 3 college football game in StubHub’s six-year history -- exceeded only by the 2006 Rose Bowl and last week’s Ohio State-Michigan game -- according to a company spokesman.

Tickets via StubHub had been purchased from $80 to $2,352 as of Tuesday afternoon, and a ticket originally priced at $65 was on sale for as much as $2,700. The average price for a ticket sold was $383 per seat, down from $446 for last year’s game in South Bend, Ind. But the drop in price didn’t reflect demand, because StubHub already had sold four times as many tickets to this year’s game; it could mostly be pinned on the Coliseum’s containing roughly 13,000 more seats than Notre Dame Stadium.

On EBay, two tickets on the 20-yard line were going for more than $900.

Tickets on broker barrystickets.com were selling from $228 to $2,700. Ken Solky, vice president of the National Assn. of Ticket Brokers, suggested purchasing tickets only from an NATB member such as Barry’s because the organization offered a 200% refund guarantee if a member broker failed to deliver a ticket.

*

ben.bolch@latimes.com