It's easy to say that, but there's no way that can be reality. The amount of money to advance your field by an order of magnitude can be quite large.

Research is expensive and funding is hard to come by. Therefore, if you want to have a job next year, you end up doing 'safe' experiments that only incrementally advance your field.

In order to get funding for more radical ideas, you need to have a history of good results (and past funding). Which usually means you have to be a professor already.

(Also, many people who aren't professors, such as postdocs, cannot directly get funding from many funding agencies. They usually require you to be a professor already...)

Except right now, in order to be a professor, you're mostly writing grants, not "advancing the state of the art by an order of magnitude."

Even the greatest geniuses do not advance their field by an order of magnitude all by themselves within seven years of receiving their PhD and their first permanent position (a tenure-track evaluation timeline). Einstein took ten years after publishing on special relativity and the photoelectric effect to discover and publish general relativity. Hell, in 1905, he only had five papers published and had just finished his PhD thesis.

You just denied tenure to Albert Einstein.

(Luckily, in real life, he was appointed a lecturer in 1908, three years after finishing his degree, and became an assistant professor in 1909 and a full professor in 1911.)

Also, pay them more.

Where is the money going to come from? Undergraduate tuition has already reached ridiculous levels.

You can get administrative head count back to 1980s levels. You can also ban 7 figure salaries for University administrators. That would pretty much do it. It is a simple problem with a simple solution.

You can start by disbanding the football teams.

That's a great idea, but at many schools it wouldn't actually raise much money. It's not as though the idiot boosters will be just as happy to see their money going toward lab equipment as toward e.g. barbells.

While I'm not a huge fan of college football, at many schools the football teams are effectively profit centers due to media rights and merchandising.

or just pay them.