Apparently I'm not the only one who gets cranky thinking about NCAA Final Four seats. Writes sydney:

Howdy - nice post about the Final Four tickets. Why DO the lottery tickets suck??? Who gets the good ones? And why are they clearly allowed to sell them via StubHub and eBay and etc?

And it's not only the Final Four. The regional tickets stunk too. If you bought them as early as possible, they were STILL up in the second tier. Dude, the venue is empty. E-M-P-T-Y. No stinking way are the good seats sold. Why can't I get them legitimately? Why do I have to buy them from a scalper? And how did the scalper get them?

And, yes, we do realize where the "good" seats go, as J.G. points out:

Pretty much all of the good tickets that go to fans are allocated to the teams that make the Final Four. I'd guess that's somewhere on the order of 2,000 to 2,500 per team, based on the extent of purple, red and blue in the lower bowl of the arena in Tampa. (It doesn't work with orange, which shows up everywhere, even in other teams' sections, when Tennessee is in the Final Four.) Also, as someone who's done the lottery nearly every year since 2000, I've had tickets as close to the front of the upper tier as the front row and as far back as the second-to-last row. They've always been in the area from roughly the free throw line to right behind the basket, though.

Anyway, my sense is that the good seats mostly go to the teams, with the rest of them split up among NCAA favorites, sponsors and ESPN. Then the decent but not great seats mostly get doled out to WBCA members and others who are somewhat important to the NCAA. That leaves the end seats in the top tier for the rest of us. I remember that, at least once, the lottery offered the chance to get better tickets - long enough ago that there were different prices for different types of seats - but I ended up with the so-so seats anyway.

As for the lottery rules and payment options, I always do the credit card because it does defer payment for a month or so, but you're absolutely right that the system is not designed to minimize costs to the fan. I'd probably scream more about the service fees, but I've noticed that everyone charges them for everything now. Around me, you can't even avoid them by buying your tickets at the box office, which is particularly maddening.

I've also found that you don't need to put anywhere near 10 entries into the lottery to get tickets. I usually do three or four. I've missed just once, and if I remember correctly, that was the year I decided to enter only twice. Even then, though, I have to agree that the system favors people who can give up access to $700 to $3,300 for several months at a time, which certainly is a problem for a lot of people. My guess is that the NCAA doesn't care that much because (a) the games sell out every year; and (b) the system was designed for the men's Final Four, where bleeding the fans is an even bigger tradition.

You know, I'm quite aware of the financial realities behind the business that is women's basketball (which is why the incompetence of the Liberty subscription/management people drives me mad). But it still ticks me off that someone who buys their tickets 11 months in advance is guaranteed a sucky seat. Mostly, because it goes against what needs to happen in wbball - developing fans of the GAME not just of a team.

I used to live and die with my Liberty -- didn't know about NCAA, NAIA, Junior Colleges, overseas....It was all Lib all the time.

Much has changed since that amazing summer of 1997. I've become a fan of the game as a whole, and it sucks -- because when I make my now annual pilgrimage to the Finals, I know I'll need to bring my binoculars and hope I don't get a sudden case of vertigo.