Texas vs. Alabama leads strong field of college football bowl game matchups

It's the Texas Longhorns vs. Alabama Crimson Tide for college football's Bowl Championship Series National Championship Game on January 7, and for the first time since 2005, the nation's #1 (Alabama) and #2 (Texas)-ranked teams will both enter the game undefeated.

The BCS championship game also marks the first time the two storied college teams will meet in almost 30 years.

According to published reports, tickets for roughly 52,000 of the 92,000 seats in the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, CA – where both the January 1 Rose Bowl and the BCS National Championship will be played – have already been set aside for Alabama, Texas and local sale, leaving about 40,000 tickets available. Most of those will end up for sale to the general public, beginning on December 15 from Ticketmaster, but the exact number is unknown.

Tickets for the championship game were carrying a face value of $275 each, not including service charges, but Ticketmaster was also offering VIP packages with airfare for thousands of dollars.

"We've seen quite a bit of activity since the games ended Saturday, particularly buyers from Alabama and Texas for the BCS Title game," Joellen Ferrer, spokesperson for StubHub, told TicketNews. As of today, the price range for tickets to the game on StubHub was between $840 and $80,000. "Currently, 45 percent of the buyers are from Texas and 12 percent are from Alabama."

Of the other BCS games, the Rose Bowl presented by Citi, considered the "Grand Daddy" of the college bowl landscape, will feature Ohio State against Oregon; the AT&T Cotton Bowl, January 2, will feature Oklahoma State vs. Ole Miss; the Allstate Sugar Bowl, January 1, will feature Florida vs. Cincinnati; the Tostitos Fiesta Bowl, January 4, will feature Boise State vs. TCU; and the FedEx Orange Bowl, January 5, will feature Iowa vs. Georgia Tech.

On the secondary ticket market, the BCS championship game and the Rose Bowl appear to be the most sought after at the moment, according to brokers. On ticket search engine FanSnap, tickets for the Rose Bowl were starting at $238 and averaging about $455 a piece.

"The BCS championship obviously has been good," said one East Coast broker, summing up what others seem to be experiencing. "The Rose Bowl has been decent. I don't know much about the rest."