Had normalcy prevailed, this winter could have been phase two of one helluva feel-good year for Ohio State athletics and for its veteran athletic director, Andy Geiger.

Despite the controversy surrounding former All-American running back Maurice Clarett's allegations of improprieties, some valid, many disproven, and the resultant National Collegiate Athletic Association investigation, the football team enjoyed an 8-3 regular season.

An oh-so-tasty 37-21 upset victory over the hated "Gang Up North" from Michigan, then tacked on a stunning 33-7 Alamo Bowl rout of Big 12 power Oklahoma State punctuated what was supposed to be a rebuilding season with an exclamation-point finish.

Then the troubled men's basketball program, under new coach Thad Matta, threw its cares away, shocked the Big Ten with a 14-7 record by January's end, 3-4 in Big Ten play, but even somewhat competitive in an early-season loss at No. 1 Illinois.

After good-guy Jim O'Brien was fired last June as basketball coach last spring following revelations he had fronted recruit Aleksandar Radojevic some $6,000 from his personal savings in 1999 to aid his family in war-pockmarked Serbia, the Buckeyes men's team had seemingly hit rock-bottom, with slim prospects for the 2004-5 season.

Additionally, word surfaced that Boban Savovic, whose family also lives in the war-torn Balkan region, allegedly received academic and material assistance from a Columbus nanny during Savovic's years at O.S.U. between 1998-2002, in defiance of the N.C.A.A.'s complex web of thou-shalt-not commandments.

Unlike much of the shady world of under-the-table payoffs and booster club $1,000 handshakes, this particular road to hell had been paved with the best of intentions. Sadly, O'Brien's actions had left Ohio State Athletic Director Andy Geiger with little choice but to fire him.

But Thad Matta, after nearly rejecting Ohio State to stay in charge of Xavier's highly-successful program, finally decided to bring his talents to the Big Ten stage with his eyes wide open.

The talent supply was supposedly gone, but suddenly, Terrence Dials, Brandon Fuss-Cheatham and friends, given resuscitation, rediscovered their self esteem and a totally unexpected 14-7 record signalled a rebirth of O.S.U. men's hoops as the season entered its February phase.

But that celebration would have to wait a year, because the university self-imposed a probation that would include no participation in the 2005 postseason.

Still, Geiger seemed to be well on his way toward one of the crowning achievements of his distinguished 34-year career which includes athletic directorships at Brown University, the Universities of Pennsylvania and Maryland, Stanford and, for the past 11 years, Ohio State.

Had normalcy prevailed, Geiger, 65, could have anticipated a well-orchestrated going away tribute in June, 2006, with well-wishers that would read like a who's who list of intercollegiate athletics.

But the only normalcies at Ohio State these days include ongoing visits from gray-suited, solemn-faced bureaucrats from the N.C.A.A. offices in Indianapolis sniffing around the O.S.U. campus following each and every allegation of illegal eye-winking, coke-and-sandwich lunch and CD purchase.

Geiger had done just about everything but take the Indy inquisitors for a swim in the Olentangy. Which brings us back, briefly, to Clarett.

Driven at least in part by a mother who works in the Mahoning County (Ohio) bureaucracy and who could politely be described as financially ambitious, Clarett, the brilliantly-talented 6-feet, 2-inch, 220-pounder, whose dizzying display of rushing played a key role in the Buckeyes' 2002 national title, pushed to become the first college freshman to become eligible for the National Football League draft.

His sordid tale doesn't need a full retelling here, but it certainly tested the patience of not only Geiger, but also the Buckeyes football staff, academic advisors and all manner of university personnel.

Suffice it to say, amid the list of allegations about "Getting the money straight" with O.S.U. boosters, bogus car rentals, academic inconsistencies, et al, which first surfaced in largely-misreported form in The New York Times, Geiger found his own reputation coming into question. The original reporter has since left The Times.

Waging an honest and at times borderline-heroic campaign against media disinformation, misdirected inquiries and would-be zealous image-tarnishers, the quixotic nature of the task finally took its toll on Geiger, a 1961 Syracuse University graduate.

More allegations surfaced this past fall, including starting quarterback Troy Smith receiving cash from Ohio State booster Robert Q. Baker of Springfield to help pay Clarett's overdue cell phone charges, causing the talented sophomore to be suspended from the Alamo Bowl game.

As he stood in front of a January 5 makeshift press conference in the athletic department offices, it was not at all like the spring 2003 farce outside St. John Arena where Michelle Clarett, several African-American leaders, Cleveland Browns Hall-of-Famer Jim Brown and others rotated Geiger on an inquisitional spit, Geiger fought gamely to control his emotions.

Anger had given way to despair as Geiger addressed a stuffed room full of reporters that included The (Cleveland) Plain Dealer's T.C. Brown from the paper's Columbus Bureau.

"I find my work is no longer fun, and I don't look forward with enthusiasm to each day," he said. "I'm bone weary and it's not a kind of tired a good night's sleep fixes."

He had thought of announcing his resignation earlier, but in what might be construed as yet another classy gesture, Geiger waited until after the holidays to announce he would step down in June. He insisted the swirl of allegations, national news media in full vulture mode were not the cause. But his basset hound facial expressions said otherwise.

"I am not running. I am not hiding," he said, with Ohio State President Dr. Karen Holbrook standing alongside. "I am making a management decision that is best for my family.

"I vowed I would never hang around until it was too late. It is time for me to change direction and it is time for Ohio State to seek new leadership for its Department of Athletics."

He had been chronicled as "Earnest, forthright, a great athletic representitive of a university," during his Penn days by The Philadelphia Inquirer's Frank Dolson.

He has been hailed by former Ohio State President E. Gordon Gee, currently Vanderbilt's, as "One of the truly good people in collegiate athletics, a man of impeccable integrity."

This from one of higher education's most respected leaders, a man who took a stunning initiative of eliminating Vandy's Athletic Department and putting its management under the wing of that school's general administration.

To gauge just how successful Geiger's 11-year tenure in Columbus has been, there is this to consider...

• A national football championship
• A men's basketball Final Four appearance
• A hugely-successful women's hoops program
• A baseball team that makes the N.C.A.A. Tourney annually
• Highly competitive teams in nearly every varsity sport

Structurally, the entire face of athletics has changed. On his watch the following facilities have been either built or upgraded.

• Ohio Stadium's $50 million modernization, which includes a 15 percent higher seating capacity, luxury boxes, more and better restrooms and refreshment and concession stands while still retaining much of the old image and atmosphere.
• The Schottenstein Center, a 19,200-seat basketball and hockey facility.
• A 4,400-seat varsity baseball facility that would be the pride of most Class A minor league teams.
• The 10,000-seat Jesse Owens Track & Field Stadium.
• The workout facilities have been massively upgraded, the academic liaisons and student-athlete performances as strong as ever.

It is a resume which might blind the reader with its glow. But because of these two recent missteps, too many people will remember Andy Geiger for the wrong reasons.

The carnivorous approach too many media take to mean "objective journalism" was never more apparent than the hatchetry practiced by ESPN The Magazine, which found a way to denounce Ohio from Port Clinton to Portsmouth, from Steubenville to Sidney, Montpelier to Marietta, saving some of their most vitriolic imagery for the city of Youngstown, Clarett's hometown, attaching labels like "Bitter," "Corrupted," "Divided."

These same journalists are often bred in the upscale suburbs of Urban America. They are usually products of politically-correct finishing schools whose intolerance of broad-brushing subject matter apparently doesn't include middle American institutions like the amalgam of smalltown, micropolises and big cities that combine to make Ohio one of the nation's true treasures.

They are the folks whose search for journalistic red meat often aims at tearing down institutions which by and large are sacred to their alumni, students and communities and the hell with the consequences.

What they did, however unintentionally, was besmirch the virtually unimpeachable reputation of one of America's more respected intercollegiate athletic leaders. "I can't know everything," Geiger correctly told The Columbus Dispatch in December. "How can you?"

But more importantly, as the N.C.A.A. vultures continue to swirl around campus, can Jim Tressel's football program be next?

Baker, the booster and successful businessman in Springfield, had co-owned an Ohio Stadium luxury box, according to Plain Dealer O.S.U. beat reporter Bruce Hooley, but the longtime booster's relationship with Ohio State athletics has been severed, which is the right thing to do.

But such actions were likely to put another furrow or two on Tressel's 51-year-old brow. "I think they just want the whole thing to go away," said Ted Ginn, Sr., who coached his son Ted Ginn, Jr., a brilliant wide receiver and return specialist, strong safety Donte Whitner and Smith at Cleveland's Glenville High School, in a chat with Hooley.

"It's been hard on Troy. He just wants to move on."

Not to mention Tressel, who has no doubt been churning inside while displaying an outward calm. "I anguish over (Smith's taking money from Baker without touching base with Ohio State officialdom first) for a couple of reasons," Tressel told Hooley.

"Number one, there are right ways to handle all situations. Sometimes, you just have to swallow and come tell people, 'I don't know the answer to this problem. Help me do the right thing.' "

Damage Control 101. It might headline some future athletic administrators' undergraduate curriculi. Unwittingly, Geiger has been a model instructor.

A product of an upstate New York Ozzie-and-Harriet upbringing of the 1940s and '50s, where strangers were neighborly and neighbors rarely locked their doors, he always sought and usually found the better angels in college athletics.

The sad conclusion of his tenure is a result of circumstances largely beyond his control.

Those of you who think O.S.U. resides in consort with the more traditional "football factories" like many Southeastern Conference and Big 12 schools, might want to weigh the gravity of this situation against the Memphis businessman currently on trial for, among other things, allegedly bribing an area high school coach some $150,000 to steer a bluechip senior toward Alabama.

And before you apply the old joke about the traveling salesman and the prostitute whose punchline is "What you are has been established, we're just quibbling over price," know that Ohio State's student-athletes are annually cited by the Big Ten as among the league's best. And that in Jim Tressel's four-year tenure, the football graduation rate has jumped from an abyssmal 24 percent to 52.

Clearly there are issues that do not flatter The Ohio State University. But unlike some schools, led by Geiger and his well-qualified staff, the school has taken a strong, proactive approach toward addressing any and all of them.

In the end, when the N.C.A.A. has sifted through the evidence real and imagined, when the would-be Robert Woodwards have banged out their final stories, Ohio State's flawed-but-earnest approach should prove decisive in rebuilding its image.

Thanks to Geiger's efforts, the task may not be all that daunting.