How one NFL fan found $44 Super Bowl tickets on SeatGeek (yes, really)

On Sunday morning, Caitlin Kolb was nearly ready to throw in the towel. She and her friends had spent all week monitoring Super Bowl ticket prices, waiting for a miraculous dip after a starting get-in price of around $6,000. There had been brief flashes of $2,500 ticket listings during Super Bowl weekend, however those would get scooped up instantaneously.  

But about an hour before the gates opened at Levi’s Stadium for Super Bowl LX, Kolb was floored after opening the SeatGeek app. 

“I had almost kind of given up looking,” Kolb said. “I got out of bed and was like ‘okay, let me check again.’ Then all of a sudden, I’m sitting on the ground and I see this $44 price. First I’m confused, because I’m like ‘Is this real?’”

The 24-year-old LinkedIn software engineer knew that there likely wouldn’t be many more chances to attend a local Super Bowl. She moved to the Bay Area a year and a half ago after having grown up in the Chicago suburbs. The first NFL game Kolb had ever attended was when her beloved Chicago Bears took on the San Francisco 49ers at Levi’s Stadium this past regular season. Even after the Bears were eliminated in the NFC Divisional Round, she was still intrigued by the possibility of going to the Super Bowl.

Kolb and her friends kept monitoring multiple ticketing websites leading up to the Super Bowl. She first started checking a couple times a day, before upping her frequency to multiple refreshes per hour closer to kickoff. Kolb was hoping to find seats below $3,000, though no one could have dreamt about what would unfold in her Sunnyvale apartment on Sunday morning. 

As soon as Kolb saw the $44 ticket listing, she didn’t freeze. Rather, she immediately clicked on them and purchased Seats 6-9 in Section 145, Row 23. Kolb had her payment information already in the app after having used SeatGeek previously to attend other live events. The order went through, and an email hit her inbox shortly after with the verified tickets. 

She sat on her living room floor stunned. One of her roommates walked out of her bedroom and asked what happened. After Kolb told her about what had just transpired, she said, “What do you mean?” Her roommate wasn’t the only one confused. Kolb next called her friends who she had joined forces with on the Super Bowl ticket hunt, and they thought she was pranking them. Then she called her family, who also didn’t believe the news.

“If this was a site I had not used before, I definitely would not have bought the tickets because I feel like that just seems completely unrealistic,” Kolb said. “Like everyone I told, they’re like, ‘Are you being scammed?’ My mom was like, ‘Did you give out your credit card information?’ I was like, ‘No, it’s SeatGeek. We’ve used this, we just used this a few weeks ago. It’s fine.’”

Kolb did not feel the need to contact SeatGeek support to get confirmation that her Super Bowl tickets were legitimate. She thought the tickets looked real and had no reason to believe they were fake since they came from one of the NFL’s official ticketing partners. She knew, though, that the ultimate test would be at the Levi’s Stadium gates. Kolb quickly threw on a black top and jeans before heading off, as she didn’t even think to put on NFL clothing with her mind racing and her heart pounding about her once-in-a-lifetime score.  

“I had the tickets transferred instantly,” Kolb said. “It was like 10:30 AM [PT] and the gates opened at 11:30 [AM], so I was just like ‘let’s just go and see.’ It probably took us about 30 minutes to get to the stadium. Since one of my other friends was closer, we both went together. We walked in and I was so nervous waiting to scan the tickets. He’s a Patriots fan, so it was a big deal for him and he started crying when we got in. It was like, this is the craziest day of our lives.”

Given how quickly she had to act, Kolb did not check the view from her seats on the SeatGeek app ahead of entering the stadium. She started to get an idea of just how good her seats were after texting a screenshot of a ticket to her brother. He responded, “Section 145, that’s insane.” Upon getting to her section and seeing how close she was to the field, she just started laughing with her friends because they couldn’t believe this was actually happening.

Kolb was swept up by the Super Bowl festivities, as her lofty expectations were exceeded by extravagant pregame activations, Bad Bunny’s captivating halftime show and, of course, getting to see two teams fight for the NFL’s biggest prize. One day later, she’s still not sure whether to pinch herself.

 “That’s a story that you remember forever,” Kolb said. “Even throughout the week, SeatGeek had the lowest prices, which is part of the reason why I was checking SeatGeek so much. SeatGeek got me $44 tickets to the Super Bowl, so I will forever be looking at SeatGeek.”