Buying top bowl tickets is a game in itself

So your favorite team just claimed a berth in one of college football's top bowl games. What are you going to do next?

You're going online, of course.

As if December weren't already fraught with shopping madness, fans of dozens of colleges whose teams will be playing over the holidays — preferably in a marquee game somewhere in the Sun Belt — are scrambling to come up with the connections and the cash that will land them in the stadium.

Now, many could have avoided this predicament and been assured of choice bowl-game seats by purchasing their team's season tickets. But for fans who lacked such foresight, the Web provides a number of ways for ticket sellers and ticket buyers to find one another. And even for those just browsing, it offers the most transparent of insights into the sports-ticket economy.

Your shopping may take you to city-specific online bazaars like craigslist.org, the vast auction domain of eBay, or dedicated ticket marketplaces like stubhub.com or ticketsnow.com. Even a search-engine query can turn up leads.

Wherever you start, just eliminate the words "face value" from your vocabulary. "There is NO direct relation," notes a disclaimer at TicketsNow, between "the price listed on our Web site and the price printed on the ticket."

And how. For evidence, you need look no further than the Orange Bowl game on Jan. 4 in Miami, matching No. 1 Southern California against No. 2 Oklahoma. (My interest in this one is more than academic: I'm a graduate of USC.) Because the Orange Bowl was designated more than a year ago as this season's national championship game, tickets have been officially sold out for weeks. Many were guaranteed to those who bought tickets to last year's (nonchampionship) game.

"Buying a ticket to a national championship game shouldn't be easy," said Joe Hornstein, media relations manager for the Orange Bowl Committee. Online, though, there is certainly a market, with prices reflecting both the game's stakes and the potential profits to be had by ticket holders who may never have planned to attend.

In the tidy, efficient marketplace that is StubHub, whose sellers include individuals and ticket agencies alike, there were more than 200 sellers on Tuesday evening offering a total of nearly 1,300 Orange Bowl tickets. A number were in lots of up to 20 tickets together. (Sites like StubHub and TicketsNow hold no tickets themselves but merely serve as a mechanism for buyers and sellers to connect and provide some guarantees, taking fees from both sides to manage the transaction.)