College football is a professional sport. Admit it.

When coaches get paid millions of dollars, the following shouldn't surprise us, right?

From the LA Times:
The season opener means more than just a football game for USC. Before the Trojans play Virginia on Saturday, they must fly more than 2,500 miles across country on a charter flight.The airport in Charlottesville, Va., isn't large enough to accommodate the team's normal plane, so the USC entourage -- coaches, players, administrators and boosters -- will leave this afternoon in a pair of Boeing 757s.

How awful that must be for them. What if one plane has more caviar than the other? OMG!

From the IHT:
It used to be when Appalachian State ventured out of its own level of competition to play a major school, it meant only one thing.
"It was a money game," coach Jerry Moore said.
Like most schools playing in Division I college football's second tier, App State would collect a six-figure check to help pay the bills...

Well, the six figure is actually $600,000. Lowly Appalachian State gets that much money to play LSU, which means that LSU gets a lot more than that, right. Want an idea of how much money is involved? This commentary about the ESPN deal will give you a flavah of the moolah:
SEC’s staggering 15-year deal with ESPN that will reportedly pay the league about $2.25 billion. That deal, coupled with the 15-year deal the SEC has signed with CBS will give the league financial security for a long, long time.

BTW, those football players are supposedly students too. As a friend joked the other day, "I had no idea there was a real university--with buildings and classrooms--that has the same name as the football team!" The joke is on us :-(