Penn State Would Like Another 40 Bucks, Please

This will probably go down as the most appallingly cheap money-grab of the season: Penn State has prohibited bringing seatbacks into Beaver Stadium, but you can lease one from PSU for 40 bucks. Black Shoe Diaries is displeased...

Forty bucks for this?!?! I can buy one of those at McLanahan's for $20, and I get to own the friggin thing. Is this thing going to be mounted in my seat permanently all year? Through the sun, rain, and snow as well? But I can't bring my own dry seat that has been sitting in my vehicle all day. No, I have to sit on your soaking wet one? And pay you $40 to do so?

...on the other hand, Run Up The Score sees a silver lining:

I'm not the smallest guy in the world, but I can scrunch with the best of them...and there's nothing worse than having two or three 300+lb. people in your row that throw the seating off by two or three seat numbers in a row of 20 seats. If we can get the fatties and the geriatrics to stay in the parking lot, I'll buy seatbacks for my entire row.

Indeed, the promotional photograph both sites deploy artfully points out that the pre-installed seatback "clearly defines your seat space," an ever-more important matter in stadiums that feature undifferentiated benches and increasingly mammoth occupiers of same. Each fall, my family engages in a silent war with a tubby fan, seemingly all flubber and knees, who encroaches as much as a half-seat into our expensive little kingdom, implacable as a glacier. The key is the feet. You get them locked in and you don't move them for anything, soldier, not even Armageddon.