Indiana, we’re all for you!

With the college football championship ready to be settled Monday night, we’ll be rooting for Indiana University against the University of Miami.

We have quite a few long-standing connections to the Hoosier state. Friends and family live there, including our daughter and son-in-law.

Indiana, along with Northwestern, have long been the football doormats of the Big 10, but in the past two years Indiana has emerged as a football power under coach Curt Cignetti, who has lost just two games in his two years there. Indiana’s last loss was a year ago in the football playoffs to that state’s historic grid power, Notre Dame up north in South Bend.

Indiana University may be new as a football power, but it has a reputation for basketball prowess, especially under flamboyant Coach Bobby Knight whose Hoosiers dominated college basketball for three decades from 1971-2000.

Twenty years ago, when Indiana was a football also-ran, we watched a game in Bloomington between IU and the Iowa Hawkeyes. Interest was so low, including among students, that only half the seats in spacious Memorial Stadium were occupied. You could buy a good seat at game time. Winning changed that quickly. Every game has been a sellout there this year.

Indiana’s ascent to the top of the football world resulted from the hiring of coach Cignetti last year and the recent ability of colleges to pay their players. Schools with big bankrolls can buy themselves some pretty good players. Division I college football payrolls run up to $30 million a year, not including coaches’ salaries. Quarterbacks get from $2 million to $6 million per year. Linemen earn $300,000-$800,000, tight ends get $800,000 to $1 million, and good running backs pick up $1.5 million or more. Top coaches are paid $15 million and assistant coaches can get $2 million. Twenty-year-old players on the Iowa Hawkeyes football team make more money than the president of the university, who is paid “just” $825,000.

Matt Campbell, the Iowa State coach who led the Cyclones back to football respectability, left Ames for Penn State a month ago, doubling his salary to $9 million and many of his Cyclone players followed him.

Basketball players do all right too. Superstar Caitlin Clark became a multimillionaire in college while leading the Iowa Hawkeyes women’s basketball team to national prominence a couple years ago. She actually had to take a pay cut when she joined the WNBA.

In years past, before television money destroyed amateur athletics, college athletes played for their tuition and coaches were generally limited to making no more than the highest paid professor. When Lou Holtz coached Notre Dame to its last national championship in 1988, he was paid $65,000, which was the top scale for professors. Adjusted for inflation, that would be $130,000 today. Meanwhile, Marcus Freeman, the current Irish coach who has yet to win a championship, is paid over $12 million.

I don’t begrudge these college people the opportunity to become millionaires. The NCAA used to have some pretty stupid rules restricting aid to athletes, who couldn’t take so much as a free pizza from their coach. If it would have been this lucrative when I was a student in the late 1960s, I would have become a quarterback instead of a newspaperman.

In the meantime, if the Fighting Irish can’t play in the finals, I’m rooting for the Hoosiers!