The Broncos-Cardinals Price Drop: What a 23% Weekly Swing Says About Buying Late

Some weeks the ticket market just agrees with itself. Right now, two completely unrelated matchups — an NFL road trip to the desert and a college basketball tune-up in Illinois — are both trending the same direction: down.

The Broncos-Cardinals cooldown

Broncos at Cardinals at State Farm Stadium on October 25 has been one of the more volatile tickets we've tracked since we started watching it on August 27. It peaked at $146 on September 18, then sank to $92 by October 10 — a $54 swing inside two months. The most recent move is the sharpest one yet: the price is down $29.10, or 23%, over the past week, landing well under its 30-day median of $110.40. Right now it's listed from $98.90.

That kind of pullback lines up almost exactly with what our own research shows about buying NFL tickets late. Across 547 sports events tracked between July 25 and October 19, the median price in the final two weeks before kickoff fell 14%, and 65% of those games actually got cheaper as the date approached. Broncos-Cardinals looks like it's living out that pattern in real time — you can see the full breakdown on our best-time-to-buy research page.

A cheaper ticket in a cheaper sport

Over in Champaign, Baylor at Illinois on October 23 tells a smaller but similar story. It opened at $35 back on October 2, dropped to a low of $12.65 by October 10, and is down another 13% in the last week — now sitting from $14, below its $17.25 median. Different sport, different price tier entirely, same basic shape: early-window highs giving way to late-window value.

Why this matters beyond these two games

Neither of these is an isolated case. As of October 20, our NFL price index shows 150 upcoming games with a median get-in price of $102.10 — and the spread across the league is enormous. Patriots tickets carry a league-high $351 median, with Seahawks ($280.20) and Bears ($278.50) not far behind, while Buccaneers ($50), Cowboys ($37) and Titans ($28) sit at the opposite end. A game like Broncos-Cardinals falling toward $92–99 fits comfortably in that middle tier, and the week-over-week drop suggests the market is still finding its real price rather than holding at its early peak.

None of this means every ticket gets cheaper if you just wait. Theater, for instance, moves in the opposite direction more often than not — but football and college hoops, according to our own tracked history, tend to reward patience more than panic. The Broncos-Cardinals chart and the Baylor-Illinois chart are two small, very different proof points of a much bigger pattern we've now logged across thousands of events.

If you're deciding when to pull the trigger on a game like this, the data's advice is simple: watch the early peak, let it pass, and keep an eye on the final-two-weeks window where the odds of a better price are genuinely in your favor.