by Ben Jones

Penn State and Pitt may not play for another year, but that doesn’t mean the Nittany Lion faithful aren’t already thinking of ways to get a good seat for cheap.

How so? By buying Pitt football season tickets.

That’s at least what Penn State alumnus Russ Beck is doing.

Beck’s thinking: Buying road tickets through Penn State can be expensive when you add in the cost of a ticket to your Nittany Lion Club donation and the price of season tickets.

To even be eligible for a road game ticket through the NLC can cost you big bucks in donations.

And Pitt tickets are cheap.

In fact, Beck’s plan turns out to be pretty smart. A $135 purchase this year allows him to renew tickets for the 2016 season at a discount. When it’s all said and done he plans to have spent around $270 over the span of two seasons.

“Buying season ticket this year lets me auto renew for next year in the same or better seat. Also gets parking options,” Beck said. “The idea is that I will pay less for a better seat and get parking than I would buying from the secondary market in 2016 for just the Penn State game.”

While that’s a lot of money for one ticket, knock off selling a ticket to the Pitt/Notre Dame game this season (already going for around $85 in the cheap seats) and a few other games over the next two years and that $270 price tag is turning into something more like $100 or even less.

Spending only $100 for a game that will undoubtedly sell out is a pretty solid steal. Especially when you figure tickets to Penn State’s most recent bowl trip sold between $80-$235 at face value for pretty run of the mill seats.

At the end of the day Beck could spend $100 to go to one of the more anticipated games of the season and nothing more. That’s half the price of face value to see Penn State host Michigan and Rutgers this upcoming year.

It’s not exactly a loophole, but it’s a creative way to solve a problem. Even if a Pitt ticket representative figured out that Beck was a Penn State fan by his 814 area code, it’s rare to see any football program turn down money.

And judging by message boards and the always talkative world on Twitter, Beck isn’t the only one who has thought this plan through.