Over the years, there has been a lot of badmouthing of Pitt for always forcing fans buy tickets to an extra game in order to buy tickets to Penn State games played in Pittsburgh. This practice has been cited as one of the reasons Penn State won’t play Pitt which is fine with me. If Pitt wants to be a big boy (which the claim they are) and play Penn State home & home, they need to stop doing that stuff before the conversation will resume.
Meanwhile, on the other end of Pennsylvania, Temple is making fans buy tickets to three games in order to buy Penn State tickets. Had they made Penn State tickets available individually they would run the risk of Penn State fans buying up all the seats for that game. I wound up playing along and buying the three pack. So, why did I bite the bullet and let Temple get away with that practice after bashing Pitt for it? I justified for two main reasons:
- Temple only got one home game in a four game series with Penn State.
- Temple isn’t pretending its a big boy — its trying to stay alive. That Temple didn’t drop football entirely kind of surprises me, especially since the Big East kicked them out. Penn State did Temple a big favor by scheduling them for four games when the program’s future was in jeopardy. Penn State certainly was not completely altruistic in the matter since they knew they could get favorable terms on scheduling, but I think that was part of it.
It goes without saying that I like the idea of just driving up I-95 to see my Nittany Lions play too. That trip is probably three hours less round-trip and driving along I-95 is so much easier than all those rural highways on the way to Happy Valley.
Tickets can be purchased here with prices starting at $72 each. I’m going to try and sell my tickets to the other games, but I am prepared to take a loss.
