To understand the compound, complex series of events surrounding The Ohio State University's belabored athletic department, particularly its hugely profitable revenue major sports, football and men's basketball, requires a winding trip through several eras. The "Cliff's Notes" version follows. Part one of two.

It was a press box in Ann Arbor, the year was 1987. The writers from journalism schools like Syracuse, Missouri, Northwestern and Rutgers and, yes, Michigan, were having a perfectly miserable afternoon watching Rocket Ismail and Lou Holtz's Notre Dame team run over, under and around the host team by three touchdowns.

The looks on their faces told a thousand stories about their academic/athletic preferences and prejudices. Visiting writers from the right and left coasts as well as a slew of Big Ten staffers watched in varying degrees of disapproval as the Fighting Irish stay one step ahead of the Wolverines all afternoon.

"You know," one hothead opined with surprising volume after Ismail had just returned a kickoff for a touchdown to put Notre Dame up 20-7, "there's only one place I like less than (Notre Dame). Ohio State!"

The silent assent fell well short of full tent revival atmosphere, but right there, a not-insignificant representation of the nation's college sports media offered a window to its priorities and preferences ... as some nodded in approval.

From the days when Paul Brown growled and prowled on the Ohio Stadium sideline in the early 1940s, through the mostly-blah days of Carroll Widdoes and Wes Fesler, to the tempestuous-but-glorious 26-year Woody Hayes era and on through Earle Bruce, John Cooper to the current regime of James Patrick Tressel, Ohio State, with its massive season-ticket base and well-traveled, wild-eyed zealots has been Bounty No. 1 for many in the Fourth Estate.

"I hate Ohio State, always have," one east coast journalist said that hot summery afternoon in Ann Arbor, a fairly safe place to make such a declaration. Except that this writer was setting foot on the U-M campus for the first time in his life.

Like many, when asked why, he clammed up.

"Their fans are insufferable," one respected Chicago-area journalist declared years later. "They're as mean as any I've ever seen."

The usually easy-going, witty veteran writer assumed Nuremburg Trials solemnity while talking about All Things Buckeye.

With the more respected observers who are critical of O.S.U., three is a good deal of truth in their charges. Ohio State's demanding fandom, for example, does have an element of hard-edged people who can drive coaches, players and fellow fans bananas with their short-fused reactions to game situations.

Scenario I: It is about 10:30 p.m. and late in the fourth quarter of a game at Northwestern Oct. 2 some Buckeye fans felt should have been wrapped up an hour before.

With the entire east side and most of the south end zone of historic Ryan Field shouting disapproval at a fourth-and-short situation near midfield where coach Jim Tressel opted to punt, allowing the Wildcats one last shot at a tie that would force overtime, chaos reigned.

When the 'Cats took advantage, scored and then won in overtime, some post-game stragglers wanted to hang Tressel in effigy right there.

"Pressure? What pressure?" Tressel kidded afterward. A first loss of a transitional season and the restless natives turned the entry to the O.S.U. locker room into the proverbial wagon and circled it.

"What happened, coach?" one middle-aged rural merchant/Buckeye Club high-roller demanded to know. "What happened on..."

Tressel smiled disarmingly and said, "Call 'The Fan (Columbus's sports-talk station),' I'm sure they'll tell you," and headed onto the team bus.

Scenario II: It is the following week, October 9, at Ohio Stadium, a true chance for the Bucks to restate their case for Big Ten title contention.

After the Buckeyes forced a Wisconsin punt and started with good field position following an electrifying Ted Ginn Jr. punt return, starting quarterback Justin Zwick, deathly afraid of the Big 10's dominant pass-rusher, Erasmus James, who had ravaged Penn State and Illinois the previous two weeks, was sacked by James' opposite number, Jonathan Welsh. An uneasy groan accompanied the game's first O.S.U. offensive play.

On second down, Zwick tried a three-step drop, with adequate protection, and one-hopped a pass toward an open Santonio Holmes in the left flat. A clearly-detectable round of boos wafted fieldward.

"Startin' in early today, Clem," one old-timer two rows behind us declared with a detectable Kentuckyesque twang that ID'ed him as a likely Ohio River area resident. "You'd shore think they-ud give this keeeyid a chaince."

It is this backdrop, this instant gratification mentality that rides through the near-entirety of college football, that has changed the game from sport to big business.

You want my booster club donation? Hey, pony up with a better effort on the field, bub. Hey, I invest $100,000 a year in you guys, I have a right to voice my opinion.

"Pressure, what pressure?"

Well, the tale, as you probably know, reached its ugly zenith with the resurfacing of charges from Maurice Clarett, who in two years roller coastered his way from football valhalla to the obscure shadows of Maurice Who?

His kvetch-a-thon first fascinated then-New York Times reporter Mike Freeman, who managed to mangle serious portions of the story, including the role of Clarett's tutor and her involvement in mentoring Clarett's classload. All this as a backload of east coast bitterness surfaced shortly after Clarett scored the winning touchdown in overtime as the Buckeyes knocked off the supposedly-invincible Miami Hurricanes before a virtual home crowd in Tempe, Ariz. to win their first national title since 1968.

But hey, it was The Times and, regardless of accuracy issues, a sporting nation snapped to attention.

The aftermath, of course, reached absurd levels of an early-spring 2003 media meeting outside the O.S.U. athletic offices at St. John Arena. Former Cleveland Browns great Jim Brown, Michelle Clarett, Maurice's mother who lobbied for him to push for N.F.L. eligibility almost to the day he set foot on campus, and other activists staged a rowdy press conference demanding everything but a cure for AIDS.

Then, just as quickly, Maurice Clarett, Ma Clarett, his handlers and small cadre of sympathizers disappeared. So did his #13 Buckeye jerseys from the shelves of sporting goods stores from Ashtabula to Blue Ash. Mo Who?

I'll show you who, he told scoop-hungry ESPN The Magazine late this past fall. Which is where the media angle surfaces all over again.

Tom Prince, an edgy west coast journalist of somewhat questionable credential, made it his business to pursue the entire rehash of Clarett's 2002 claims, many of which, regrettably, have been substantiated by other players.

In came a bunch of other ESPN The Rag no-name pilers-on to bad-mouth everything Ohio but Neil Armstrong, the Pro Football Hall of Fame and its seven U.S. presidents.

Youngstown, Clarett's hometown was characterized as "Bitter, divided, rusted out", a pestilence-ridden colony of ne'er-do-well backbiters, a cesspool of corruption...Ohio State supporters were often characterized as social lechers who forever were handing envelopes and car keys to anybody who ran an :04.2 40, benched 500 pounds or had a 43" vertical. Auto dealers looking to to offer rides for program favors.

The Ohio State University, shown annually by The Carnegie Foundation to be one of the 75 best "national" universities in America, was suddenly the vilest football slag pile in the land, the jump from 24% graduation rate to 52% under Tressel be damned.

And while ESPN The Televison Channel's great-just-ask-them tandem of Trev Alberts and Mark May teamed up to blindside Buckeye football, the finishing-school Woodward wannabe Pulitzer chasers from Boston to Barstow, indulged in a collective orgy of after-the-whistle hits on O.S.U.

Some, of course, deserved, although if it's not asking too much, in a bit more professional fashion.

Kirk Herbstreit, the former early-90s Buckeyes quarterback who works at both "The Fan"/AM 1460 and on ESPN's college football crew, admitted his alma mater was in up to its shins. For this, he was roundly vilified as "traiter," "rat," among the more printable labels. A "For Sale" sign was posted in front of his house and he probably would have considered a) a bomb shelter or b) an unlisted zip code if available.

Just to clarify, not a good thing. Herbstreit was, is, always will be a guy who loves his alma mater, its tradition and most importantly the fact that he is a Buckeye forever.

Although there is plenty of evidence to determine there was some misconduct among the Buckeye boosters, for people like Alberts and May to even remotely cast aspersions at Ohio State rings hollower than a Bill Clinton apology.

Alberts is a product of Tom Osborne's Nebraska, that Harvard on the Missouri that produced such typical Fulbrights as Mike Rozier, Johnny Rodgers and Christian Peter, who were in varying forms of academic or legal dung almost from the time they enrolled in Lincoln. Not to mention half a phonebook-full of other Cornhuskers.

Fast forward to the Pitt of Mark May, which was featured in a Sports Illustrated cover story of a star player who fell to his death out of a dorm window several stories above the street. It was the Pitt of marginal academics, whose players were very rarely confused with Sir Lawrence Olivier and many of whom were alleged to be total strangers to that enduring college entity known as a classroom.

But ramble they did. And columnists like bitter Miami cheerleader Dan LeBatard filled our ears with extra helpings of dreck.

"(Ohio State's football program) has sold its soul to be nationally relevant again," LeBatard, a Miami Herald employee, who sounds on-air like a constipated C-student philosophy major, insisted on ESPN's east-coast-biased "The Sports Reporters" January 2.

Nice, coming from a guy who resides in the area that houses the "Convicts" half of the infamous Notre Dame shirt "N.D. vs. Miami: Catholics vs. Convicts".

The easiest backdoor is the infamous, "That's right, kill the messenger." Reading his tripe after the Buckeyes bounced his sacred icons all over Sun Devil Stadium, knocking both star running back WIllis McGahee and quarterback Ken Dorsey out with savage hits, you could almost take pity on a shamless fan of a team that had trouble convincing 5% of the crowd of 73,000 to make the trek from Miami.

Needless to say, the rest of the place was shamelessly decorated in Buckeye Scarlet and Gray. Talk about bitter. So LeBatard joins a batallion of preconceived notioneers who are only too happy to watch Ohio State rotate on the N.C.A.A. skewer. Suffer, they say collectively.

No. Ohio State will undergo a punishment that fits its alleged "crimes", nothing more, nothing less. But for a bunch of journalistic zealots, often products of schools with lightweight, poorly-supported athletic programs and whose hatred of O.S.U. is not exactly a secret, to claim they're chasing the great god objectivity in chronicling what they see as O.S.U.'s misdeeds is a little bit commissioning Dan Rather to write the definitive biography of George W. Bush.