In November 2025, LSU wanted to hire Lane Kiffin away from Ole Miss. So a private jet flew from Baton Rouge to Oxford, Mississippi, and brought him in.
The plane was a Bombardier Challenger registered to a company run by a major LSU booster, not to the university. It broadcast its own position the entire way, the way every airliner does, and Baton Rouge TV stations matched the tail number as it shuttled between the two towns. Nobody needed an inside source. A few days later LSU made the hire official and handed Kiffin a deal worth roughly $13 million a year.
That one trip is the whole idea of this site: enormous, public-facing money, moved around in plain sight, on a signal anyone with a $20 receiver can pick up.
Most of these schools are public
The vast majority of major college football programs are public universities: public money, public employees, open-records laws. The head coach is often the highest-paid public employee in the entire state. When that coach flies private to a recruit’s hometown, a public institution is at the center of it, even when the jet belongs to a booster.
They make a ton, and they spend a ton
The salaries stopped being normal a long time ago. Alabama pays Kalen DeBoer a base of $6.25 million. LSU’s deal for Kiffin runs to $13 million a year.
And that is all before anyone leaves the ground.
The flying is its own line item. Minnesota’s football program ran up about $1.2 million in charter flights across 2024 and 2025, a number that exists only because someone filed the records request. A Michigan State booster gave the football program roughly $85,000 worth of time on his private plane for recruiting trips, which surfaced because the gift had to be logged on a disclosure form. None of this is leaked. It is public, if you know what to ask for and who to ask.
And they hide more of it every year
Here is the catch: as the spending climbs, the disclosure shrinks.
Some states let athletic departments route money through booster foundations that sidestep open-records laws. In 2026 the FAA began withholding aircraft owners from its public registry by default. The record is being closed off, one exemption at a time.
The jet is the thing they can’t turn off
Which is exactly why we watch the planes. A coach’s calendar is private. A donor’s checkbook is private. But an aircraft in flight is required, by law, to broadcast who and where it is, on an open frequency, to anyone listening. That is the one signal they cannot switch off. We catch it, tie the aircraft to an owner through public records, and work out where the jet went and what it was most likely doing there. How we do that, and where we stop, is laid out in our methodology.
Why it’s worth your time
It’s fun. A multimillion-dollar jet darts between small-town airports on a Tuesday in December, like a piece moving on a board, and you know exactly what it means.
But mostly it is this: it is your money, your state’s university, and the people moving it around would rather you weren’t looking. Every year there is a little less of it you are allowed to see. The jet is what is left.
So we look.