SCOTTSDALE, Ariz. - With the Oregon and Auburn football teams five days from playing in the BCS national championship game, ticket prices are skyrocketing to unprecedented heights.

On Wednesday afternoon, asking prices on resale site

started at $3,899 and climbed to $15,995 for a seat on the 50-yard line. On Zigabid, a price-negotiating site based in Southern California, tickets were selling for about $5,000 apeice, founder Dan Rubendall said.

“Right now, its unprecedented,” Rubendall said. “It’s absolutely the craziest scene we’ve ever seen. I mean, this is bigger than any Super Bowl we’ve seen in 20 years.”

Asking prices also were in the thousands of dollars on Craigslist.org, and traffic on all sites appeared to be high.

“Right now this game is tracking as the top-selling event in the history of StubHub,” up 40 percent from last year’s BCS championship matchup, spokesman Glenn Lehrman said. “The average ticket price is currently at $1,107 per ticket.”

Lehrman confirmed that orders from Alabama are outpacing those from Oregon by 2-1.

Driving demand are the facts that Oregon never has played for a national title and that Auburn hasn’t won a championship in decades. Each team has an explosive offense that has stirred interest among even fans not allied with the teams. And the venue for Monday night’s game, 73,000-seat University of Phoenix Stadium in Glendale, Ariz., is much smaller than the host of the 2010 title game, the 92,000-seat Rose Bowl in Pasadena, Calif.

For last year’s championship between Alabama and Texas, ticket prices on Zigabid peaked at about $1,000, Rubendall said, then declined to about $350, or just over the $300 and $325 face values.

Rubendall said it was difficult to predict what would happen to asking prices between now and kickoff, 5:30 Pacific on Monday.

“It could open up tomorrow morning at $3,000,” Rubendall said. “There’s just no way of knowing.”

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