The Marquette/Missouri men’s basketball game on Sunday, November 15, 2026, went into presale this past week with tickets going on sale to the general public on Friday morning. You may have missed that because I didn’t get an email about it from the Marquette ticket office until Tuesday afternoon at 4:06pm Central time when the presale started Wednesday at 10am. Hilariously, I am on the United Center mailing list because I have purchased Chicago Blackhawks tickets in the past, so I got their presale code for access at 10:01am on Thursday at 10am. That email came in eight minutes before I was granted access by way of my Marquette season ticket holder code. PRO TIP: That’s a stupid way to run a presale for your season ticket holders, even if it is for people somewhere below #500 on the priority points list.
BY THE WAY: Making all of this worse? My Marquette season ticket emails go to my work email — for reasons, it makes sense, shh — and I wasn’t actually at work on Wednesday or Thursday, so I didn’t see any of the MU ticket access emails until Friday. That’s why you give people more than 18 hours notice on a sale for a game that you’ve known about since April.
Now, I wasn’t exactly disappointed I missed the emails. For various other life reasons, I wasn’t going to be able to go to the United Center for the game anyway, so other than the tomfoolery about the process, it didn’t matter that I essentially missed the entire presale window. Looking at it now on Saturday afternoon, it’s also ridiculously clear that it did not matter, as there are plenty of tickets still available in the 100 and 200 sections of the United Center. See?
I cropped out the 300 level because there’s no tickets available up there, and there weren’t when I managed to sneak into the very end of the presale either. I presume they’re not even bothering to sell them unless the lower two sections sell out.
And that brings us around to why there’s so many tickets still available and wondering whether or not the game is going to sell out.
You see those open seats as close to the floor as possible on the bottom of the image, by either basket? The left side is section 113, the right is section 110.
No, really! $481.35 per ticket! Go look for yourself!
That’s the price for every row back to Row 8 in the sideline sections on both sides of the court! The season ticket holder price for the same seat at Fiserv this season is $153 per game for just the ticket, $367 if you include the mandatory Blue and Gold Fund donation!
For the record: These were the prices on the Marquette season ticket holder presale as well! You get no discount for being a season ticket holder and getting early access to the tickets!
Let’s shift over to the bottom right of the map. You see the four full rectangles along the sideline, then the first wedge shaped section? That’s Section #109, which is where I sat for the Marquette/Indiana game last season. Thanks to the GoMarquette.com ticket archive, I can see my invoice for those tickets, and I can see I paid $100. If you count off the rows on my Instagram post, you can see I was in row 10.
There are currently tickets available in Rows 7 through 19 in Section 109. Every single ticket in the section? $180!
The cheapest seats in the building are in the 200 level, which is the club level in the UC, but they’re not universally priced. The sideline seats that are still available are $119.70, while the endline seats are $89.55. Quite obviously, a lot of the club level seats have gone quickly, although that might be a gamble on the UC opening up the concession stands and ameneties to their full extent on that level for this game.
I don’t know who the Gazelle Group thinks they’re fooling with this. As you can see, tickets are not flying out the door for this. Does Missouri have a large alumni group in Chicago? Saint Louis, sure, but up in northeast Illinois? Does the Chicago area Marquette fanbase really feel like playing extremely premium prices after MU went 12-20 last season and the Golden Eagles lost both of the two games they played in Chicago in that campaign AND they didn’t come close to selling out the game in UIC’s arena?
I guess the good news is that because the Marquette presale was just “here’s a code, have fun,” we can presume that MU is not on the hook for selling a block of tickets on their own. That’s a positive, although I would wonder how much monetary value there is for the Golden Eagles in playing this game if Gazelle Group is going to struggle to recoup the building rental because of slow sales?
At least the Chicago Bears have a bye week on that particular Sunday, right?
Marquette fans, how do you feel about the Golden Eagles playing a neutral site game in a United Center with a tarped off upper deck as opposed to playing a home-and-home series instead? There’s 18 home games on the schedule for MU this season, so playing this on a neutral isn’t a real loss from the home slate, but I’d wager the atmosphere would be better either at Fiserv Forum or at Mizzou Arena in Columbia.
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