If the current Kansas football team finishes as well as the last two Jayhawk crews that got off to a 7-0 start, there’ll be dancing in the streets and the coaching staff will fare even better financially than it is now. There’ll be bonuses if Kansas winds up in a big-time bowl game; raises already may be under consideration.

With five games left, KU 2007 easily could win three, maybe four, and be no worse than the 10-2 that Glen Mason and Co. produced in 1995 with a finishing victory over UCLA in the Aloha Bowl. Texas A&M on Saturday will be treacherous. Our guys think they’re ready to prevail, and they just might.

After its 7-0 run in ’95, Kansas fell 41-7 at Kansas State, beat Missouri, got ripped 41-3 by Nebraska, then rebounded with a 22-17 victory at Oklahoma State before going to Hawaii.

Pepper Rodgers’ 1968 Jayhawks lost to Oklahoma, 27-23, in their eighth game but dispatched Kansas State and Missouri to tote a 9-1 record into that 15-14 Orange Bowl heartbreaker with Penn State.

This KU team realistically can see wins in any of its last five games, and it’s been a long time since people have been talking so much Jayhawk football. They’re getting to know and admire the resourceful youngsters who wear their colors and are proud as the dickens. Such enthusiasm carries over, and KU enters the stretch run invigorated by the warmth and intense interest in their doings.

As for coach Mark Mangino’s 12-man coaching staff, it is doing an exceptional job. Athletic director Lew Perkins will make that even clearer with raises at the end of something like a 10-3 or 11-2 year.

Heading the assistants’ salary list is defensive coordinator Bill Young with a $214,120 package. Next is new offensive coordinator Ed Warriner at $210,000. Both get heavy credit, and they should, for how they have the Jayhawks flying.

KU’s other 10 assistants are averaging $141,700 with the highest figure in this group $199,000 and the lowest $120,000. Nobody under six figures. What about “civilians” on the Mount Oread payroll?

Stablemate Chuck Woodling had an exceptional Tuesday piece about how the NCAA’s Knight Commission has found that academicians increasingly accept the fact they’re dealing with the entertainment business and have no hope of derailing Big Football and Big Basketball.

Last I checked, the average FULL professor at KU gets something like $90,000 to $95,000 per annum, around $50,000 less than the 10 “lowest-paid” football assistants. At Texas, the difference is at least $55,000, and at Oklahoma it’s about $60,000. Woodling quoted the Indiana law school dean: “… the faculty sense that if they tried to get in front of the train, they’d just get run over anyway.”

With a sellout set for the Kansas-Missouri game Nov. 24 in Kansas City, Mo., each club is due to take home $2 million. A hundred years ago this November, the Kansas-Missouri game was shifted from Kansas City to St. Joseph, Mo., after a K.C. field owner tried to hike the rental fee too much. St. Joe went all-out playing host to the event, and it drew a record crowd of about 8,500. The gate receipts totaled $8,360, and each team took home $2,000. This year’s take will be 1,000 times that.

When bucks like that flooding in, we’ll see coaching salaries keep rising, and the almighty dollar will increasingly rule who does what and with which and to whom in college sports. Except you better win, baby!