This year’s Super Bowl match up between the Indianapolis Colts and the New Orleans Saints is yielding good ticket sales on the secondary market, reportedly better than last year’s Cardinals-Steelers game. Peyton Manning and the Colts won the chance to play in Miami on February 6, after defeating the New York Jets 30-17, and nearly 58 million television viewers watched Drew Brees and the Saints upset Brett Favre and the Minnesota Vikings, 31-28 in overtime. Now that the big game has been decided, fans are turning to the secondary market for a chance to watch it live.

According to statistics released by FanSnap, an online secondary ticket search engine, Super Bowl XLIV ticket searches are up 40 percent over last year. FanSnap has over 7,000 Super Bowl tickets listed, with the average ticket price of $2,847. The lowest-priced ticket, as of January 26, is $1,500.

Louisiana residents are the top-searching fans on the secondary market as of yesterday, and are out-searching Indiana fans 3:1. California, New York, and Florida are the other ticket hot zones, and those residents are also out-searching Indiana residents.

In terms of sales, statistics released this morning by secondary ticket giant StubHub show that dollar volume sales for this year’s Super Bowl are up 40 percent year-over-year. StubHub’s average ticket price is $2,728, up from last year’s average ticket price of $2,594. StubHub’s top buyer states match those released by FanSnap.

Jeff Greenberg, owner of Marilyn-based ASC Ticket, told TicketNews that a Colts-Saints match-up was seen as the “worst of all the possibilities,” for brokers, given that the Colts won a Super Bowl in 2007, and because of the economic devastation seen in New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina. A Super Bowl with the Jets or Vikings might have commanded more movement and higher prices on the secondary market because of the historically deep pockets of New York sports fans and the mass appeal of Brett Favre.

Despite this, Greenberg noted that “ticket sales have been good to moderate so far. As long as the tickets stay where they’re at now, things are fine.”