Nick Saban flew on Alabama's private jet to complain about money in college football

Hello, and welcome to your Wednesday FOIAball, name still TBD. As a reminder, these columns are for our paid subscribers only.

Why should you pay for FOIAball? How about: I’m about to casually drop a scoop that takes two Pulitzer Prize-winning reporters, working at a major outlet, months to report out, as like, I dunno, the third-most interesting tidbit in this story.

It’s $6.99 a month, folks.

A couple weeks ago, I wanted to find out how much it costs to save college sports. 

I got a definitive answer: $104.33.

It’s an extremely reasonable figure—$12 for lunch, the rest for a 51-minute Uber ride—considering how thorny the problem is. 

But that didn’t feel right to me. It had to cost more. So I did what any normal person would do when an insufficient answer keeps nagging at them. 

I taught myself how to track private jets whose tail numbers and flight data have been blocked from public view. 

The $104.33 comes courtesy of Iowa State. Athletic Director Jamie Pollard was one of the few public school officials who attended President Donald Trump’s March 6 summit to Save College Sports. FOIAball requested all his expenses for that trip.

Ames being 900 miles from the White House, I expected a plane ticket. Instead, I got his lunch per diem and a receipt for an Uber. Which contained one little breadcrumb: He rode from Manassas Regional Airport to H Street NW. 

Archived flight data, though, didn’t show any arrivals at that airport from Iowa. Or from anywhere.

That’s because Iowa State—like a lot of schools and the uber-rich—requests that flight data from their private jet be withheld from the public. 

But you can’t make a plane disappear. So, I used a replay site to watch all air traffic across D.C. that day.

I found a school sending its plane to pick up its former coach and a governor hitching a ride with one of his big donors. 

And just for fun, I figured out the super exclusive resort mega-booster Cody Campbell's plane flew to for some relaxation after fixing amateur athletes. 

Let’s get started. Or, as I believe they say in that world, wheels up!