Let's Play!

This is how the painful college football off-season ended and the healing began: with Ohio State 's sprawling campus delightfully clogged by knots of humanity awaiting kickoff last Saturday evening; with a massive horseshoe-shaped stadium, awash in scarlet and gray, rumbling at the sight of the defending national champion Buckeyes emerging from the tunnel at the south end of the field; with erstwhile Heisman Trophy front-runner Maurice Clarett on one sideline in his sweats, serving a suspension, and across the field a Washington team that lost coach Rick Neuheisel in a midsummer scandal—bookend totems of controversy that no longer seemed quite so important, because at last there were games to play. Before the evening was finished, Ohio State would announce itself as a credible candidate to win back-to-back national titles with a 28-9 victory over the No. 17 Huskies, a win made more impressive by Clarett's absence. It was not the only message of the night, as the Buckeyes' victory was but one of many played out in packed stadiums on the season's first full weekend, initiating the wild ride that will not end until Jan. 4 at the Sugar Bowl in New Orleans . Again, the sport rejuvenates itself in places large and small.

University of Miami president Donna Shalala speaks for those who unabashedly embrace the game's renewal. "College football is a ritual that bonds us in a way that's unlike anything else in society, other than going to church or synagogue," she says. "I refuse to be cynical."

Others are more sanguine. "The passion for college sports is an amazing phenomenon," says Indiana professor Murray Sperber, a vocal critic of excess in big-time collegiate athletics. "I've talked to professors who have very rational plans for reform, but I tell them, 'You're not dealing with a rational topic' There are too many people out there whose first memory is sitting on the rec room couch while Mom and Dad rooted for the Buckeyes or the Hoosiers. Love for the home team is rooted so deep in the culture that scandals or controversy will never change it. It will always come back. Always."

Venerable Penn State coach Joe Paterno put it more simply last Friday. "Now," he said, "it's about the kids on the field."

And not a moment too soon. The 2002 season ended memorably, with Ohio State beating Miami 31-24 in the Fiesta Bowl , the first overtime championship game, a classic that was enervating and controversial and immediately took its place alongside the most compelling games ever played. But the exhilaration was not allowed to last. Over the off-season, scandal piled upon scandal into a mountainous heap of embarrassment. "It was not a good summer," says Shalala. "People saw college sports getting hit from all sides."

The problems knew no boundaries. At Alabama , where the Bear Bryant era grows more distant every autumn, coach Dennis Franchione—who seemed to have pointed the Tide toward a turnaround—abruptly left for Texas A&M . His replacement, former Washington State coach Mike Price , was fired before he coached a single game, amid controversy over his behavior during a golf junket. At Washington onetime boy wonder Neuheisel lost his job for participating in high-stakes NCAA basketball tournament pools and lying about it to the NCAA .

Legends were not exempt from the pounding. Paterno , the winningest active coach in the game (last Saturday's 23-10 victory over Temple ran his total to 337), was indirectly criticized by his own university president for having allowed defensive back Anwar Phillips to play in the Capital One Bowl though Phillips had been expelled for the spring semester after a female student accused him of sexual assault. (Phillips was acquitted of criminal charges last week and is back at Penn State .) Florida State coach Bobby Bowden (333 wins) found himself testifying in the gambling trial of former Seminoles quarterback Adrian McPherson .

The Big East was gutted when Miami and Virginia Tech accepted invitations to join the ACC after a courtship that even Shalala called "unseemly." The loss of its two flagship football programs left the Big East in danger of being left behind. "This off-season has represented the worst six months I've ever endured in this business," says Big East commissioner Mike Tranghese , a Bowl Championship Series pioneer who has done much in the last decade to shape college football, "and I believe that's true for a lot of other people in college sports. We are in a very tumultuous period right now."

No school tumbled more deeply into controversy than Ohio State . Clarett did not play on Saturday night (and will miss at least two more games) as the result of an investigation into his filing of a police report that exaggerated the value of items stolen from a car he had borrowed from a Columbus auto dealership. That probe came on the heels of a New York Times story in which a former Ohio State teaching assistant claimed Clarett had received special assistance to pass a course last autumn, preserving his eligibility for the Fiesta Bowl . The Times also alleged that other Buckeyes players had gotten similar assistance. If that weren't enough, the eligibility of several Ohio State players was briefly in question after they were paid for their appearance—and for signing autographs—at a summer function.

The mood swing in Columbus was breathtaking. Early in the summer coach Jim Tressel was blocking out time just to affix his name to the piles of posters, footballs and other souvenirs in a back office at the Schottenstein Center. Now he was playing a daily game of damage control. "Taking on one problem at a time," as Ohio State president Karen Holbrook describes it. Though Holbrook says her faith in the school's athletic department has not been shaken, the overall effect was to tarnish, just a bit, Tressel's squeaky-clean reputation and, inevitably, to dull January's euphoria.