College football now runs on money, and private jet spending shows how wide the gap is. Programs like Alabama and Michigan spent more than $1 million each. Surprisingly, the champions, Indiana, spent only a five-figure sum and still won the national title with an emphatic, unbeaten record.

According to data from The Front Office, the University of Alabama blew through $1,235,418 on private travel during the 2025 cycle. Right behind them, Nebraska logged $1,136,224, and Michigan rounded out the top tier at $1,078,481.

Before you go ahead, you might be wondering what a polar bear is doing in Arlington, Texas, looking at Nebraska’s name here. Well, it’s just to say a good amount of flying was for Matt Rhule’s personal reasons as part of his contract. Those big numbers show how much money some schools throw at private jets. Indiana did almost nothing by that standard, yet it still landed on the same podium as them.

Big-time schools treat private jets like a basic, non-negotiable tool to survive in modern sports. However, on the flip side of this high-flying arms race, head coach Curt Cignetti and the Indiana Hoosiers pulled off the ultimate financial miracle by spending a tiny $42,200 on private flights. If you put this one in perspective, Indiana’s private travel budget was merely 3.4% of Alabama’s luxury bill.

While other Power Four coaches used private jets for long recruiting trips across many states, costing anywhere between $3,000 to 7,500 for every single hour in the air, it’s safe to assume that Curt Cignetti and his staff mostly stayed local and did not fly much.

Indiana took a different route. It leaned more on the portal and local travel, instead of long private-jet trips across the country. That explains why they finished their 2026 recruiting class in the vicinity of 30–34 in the nation. For local talent, they relied on standard commercial flights or just packed into cars for old-school road trips to lock down local talent across the Midwest.

That lower travel bill did not stop Indiana from winning it all. They had a perfect 16–0 season and won the national championship game against the Miami Hurricanes with a close 27–21 victory. Needless to say, they beat the heck out of Roll Tide (38-3), delivering them the worst post-season loss in their last 101 years.

Then again, elite programs like Ohio State, Georgia, and LSU are not listed in public travel spending reports. This is not because they do not use private jets, but because their travel costs are often paid through separate booster organizations. These groups are private and do not have to share their financial records with the public, so their spending is not always visible.

Meanwhile, state-funded schools like Alabama and Indiana are forced to show their exact math.

Is math going to change for Curt Cignetti and the Hoosiers?

The primary reason coaches fight so hard for these massive aviation budgets comes down to the crazy logistics of modern recruiting. In the era of the transfer portal and NIL, time is the most valuable thing any coach has.

A private jet lets a head coach hit high schools in three different states all in a single afternoon, apparently. Even if you take this out of context. Another helpful shortcut is that luxury flight time is used as a major status symbol in contract negotiations. For instance, Texas A&M’s records revealed 39 or  40 total private trips in 2025. Of those 39, Mike Elko used 24 of those flights purely for personal travel. That cost the school nearly $493,000 just on his contract perks.

That budget story may not last long. Indiana later gave Curt Cignetti a new deal that includes 75 hours of private jet time each year. That means Indiana could start spending much more on travel going forward.

Now they are champions; the university moved fast to protect its investment by tearing up Curt Cignetti’s old contract and locking him down with a top-3 head coach salary extension back in February. Since midsize to large private jets command hourly rates anywhere from $3,500 to over $7,500, Indiana’s travel ledger will inevitably skyrocket into the mid-six-figure range on future charts.

Then again, take it with a grain of salt: the Hoosiers are a transfer-portal-heavy team. They showed that a team can still win big without spending like the richest programs. But now Indiana may begin to look more like the teams it just beat.