Ohio State and Smith Will Survive : College football: Both the program that in a large way identifies the school, and the former running back whose accusations shook it, are getting on with their business.

The Midwest autumn was full of promise a few days back, when Robert Smith was dropped at the curb in front of French Field House, at a far corner of the megalopolitan Ohio State campus. The day brought windshield ice in the morning, T-shirts in the afternoon and, with just a nudge from the imagination, perhaps even the smell of tailgate cookouts from the parking lots that surround Ohio Stadium.

This was the scent of Smith’s previous life, that of an 18-year-old college freshman who last fall held 90,000 fans in rapture and a portion of Ohio State’s volatile football future in his hands. He broke Archie Griffin’s school freshman rushing record with 1,126 yards and seemed to sit on the cusp of greatness just months out of Euclid (Ohio) High School.

But on this day, a Tuesday in the heart of football season, he is here to work out with the track team. Just another out-of-season jock, like the OSU basketball players who grind through their conditioning drills as if at hard labor. Smith lifts free weights and warms down afterward. It is a solitary exercise, as far removed from the fervor and excess of Saturday afternoons as darkness is from light.

“I’m just glad to be competing at something again,” Smith said. “I have no football concerns whatsoever. Football is strictly on a back burner for now.”

On Aug. 23, a Friday evening during preseason double sessions, Smith quit the Ohio State football team and left behind a series of accusations that shook the program to its roots. Smith accused the coaching staff of impeding his academic progress and denigrating his ambition, and said players had been “stripped almost of their dignity” by the intensity of practices, which Smith likened to a “prison camp.”

The source of the allegations was as significant as the substance. Smith wasn’t a rank-and-file football player, he was the pride of Columbus, a skilled running back with firm ambitions to someday attend medical school. That he should claim foul sliced open the program.

Smith said he would return only if Coach John Cooper and hard-nosed assistant Elliot Uzelac were removed. (Smith repeated that demand last week.) Cooper has denied the allegations, Uzelac has declined comment.

Ohio State Athletic Director Jim Jones says, to this day, “The Robert Smith situation shouldn’t have turned into a national media story.” University President Gordon Gee, who at the time of Smith’s departure was in the Soviet Union, during the coup, was astounded upon his return to find himself questioned about a disgruntled sophomore football player.

“This is the kind of story we deal with at the university all the time,” Gee said last week in an interview with Newsday. “The individual in this case just happens to be a star running back.”

Fact is, the story is incendiary. The combination of a willing student-athlete claiming mistreatment and a program that has been desperately chasing the legacy of Woody Hayes for a dozen years brought waves of attention to Columbus.

Hayes won three national championships before retiring in 1979 after a 29-year career; the football training facility and one major campus roadway are named after him. His slogans are painted on the walls of the gymnasium. His absence has never been accepted. Earle Bruce went 81-26-1 in the next nine years and was fired. (Bruce, it should be noted, had difficulty graduating players. A study by the Chronicle of Higher Education showed that only 21.7 percent of Bruce’s 1984 recruits received their degrees in five years.)

In August, it was presumed that Jones, Cooper, Uzelac and the like were caught, buck naked, caring not at all about their athletes’ academic progress. Then, a month after the initial charges, it was reported that Smith missed many summer-school classes because of a job that was not connected to football. It was rumored that Smith had partied too much. The subject of Cooper’s being in the fourth year of a five-year contract, with a winning percentage far lower than .755, came up almost daily.

It is a complex story, far more so than the early rush to judgment. It is the story of a talented athlete with a good mind and much ambition, and of the pressure society puts on him to be an example. It is the story, too, of a coach and a university trying to defend the pursuit of a ghost, and how that pursuit -- not just at Ohio State -- can blur a man’s ethics just a little.

They all jumped onto a platform together, did Robert Smith and John Cooper and Gordon Gee and Jim Jones ... and the platform buckled.

Smith took a standard pre-med curriculum in his freshman year, and performed satisfactorily. If Smith struggled academically in his freshman year, he didn’t make it known then. He has since said that the addition of Uzelac, who was brought in before spring practice in April to add toughness to the program, created an air of intolerance to any digression from football -- studies included.

But it was one summer-school course--inorganic chemistry, a requirement in the pre-med core--that ignited the Aug. 23 controversy. He was studying in that course on the night of Aug. 15 when Uzelac allegedly walked into his dorm room at curfew, 10:30 p.m., and told him to turn out the lights. This, Smith alleges, after Uzelac twice told him to miss classes and ridiculed his academic devotion.

“I know that coach Uzelac told me to miss class, twice,” Smith said last week. “I know that if Coach Cooper knew about that, he should have admitted it. And if he didn’t know about it, he should have. Or at least he should have said, ‘If it happened, it shouldn’t have, and I’ll make sure myself it never happens again.”’

Here is what Cooper said about Smith’s specific allegations: “I’ve been coaching for 28 years and I’ve never asked a player to miss an academic opportunity ... and I know damn well Elliott Uzelac hasn’t either.” Furthermore: “If Robert Smith was having troubles, all he had to do was walk through (my office) door. He never did. Not until the day he quit this team.”

Cooper, 54, came to Columbus from Arizona State in 1989, succeeding Bruce. His first three Ohio State teams went 4-6-1, 8-4 and 7-4-1. The Buckeyes won their first four games this year before losing last weekend at Illinois, a school Cooper has never beaten.

Cooper defends his ethics tirelessly and points to the fact that 14 of 17 seniors on last year’s team graduated. He personally brought Greg Smith, an OSU senior nose tackle with a 3.35 pre-med grade point average, to a reporter for an interview and allowed it to be conducted in his office.

Greg Smith (no relation) said Robert Smith was failing his summer-school course and cracked under the pressure. (To which Robert Smith responds: “They say I panicked, that there was no reason for what I did. Why is it that these people are afraid to admit that they made a mistake?”)

Greg Smith said playing football and trying to reach medical school “definitely isn’t the easiest thing in the world, but the coaches here understand.”

Cooper has never been accused of similar indiscretions. Yet he has the manner of a coach with his neck in a vise.

“You’re as good as your last win around here,” he said. “All they want is for you to win 11 games every year, go to the Rose Bowl and graduate all your players. That’s all.” Later this: “I hope to at least coach here for the length of my contract.”

He allows the conversation to wander. “The only thing that ever lets a coach win is players, pure and simple,” Cooper said. “My good friend, Jack Bicknell, got fired at Boston College because he didn’t have players and because the school didn’t support him. Put Barry Switzer at Kansas State and he’ll win two games a year.” Cooper admits academic monitoring is somebody else’s job; the football coach is paid to coach football. “I can’t tell you what half of our players are majoring in,” he said.

As to Cooper’s future, and the future of the program, that’s where Gee and Jones come in. Gee is the bow-tied, 47-year-old CEO of the largest state university in the country. He previously oversaw big-time programs at West Virginia and Colorado (during that school’s controversial renaissance under Bill McCartney). He wears professorial robes when he says, “Is football out of whack? It is. There’s too much emphasis on winning. I’m a great supporter of a strong athletic program, as long as it’s the tail and not the dog.”

Fine. But Gee also said of Cooper, “This is a very important year for John. There are high expectations of performance here. I think perhaps the end of this year is the right time to talk about (Cooper’s contract).” Now you know why Cooper is jumpy.

Jones’ role in this entire affair is most ironic. He was, more than two decades ago, one of the first academic coordinators utilized by any major university athletic program. Woody Hayes hired him. Called him the “Brain Coach.” Ohio State has painstakingly implemented academic requirements for its athletes that are among the toughest in the country -- its demands regarding progress toward a degree are stiffer than either the NCAA’s or the Big Ten’s.

“If you’ve earned enough credits to stay eligible,” Jones said, “you should graduate in a five-year period. It should be hard for you not to.” Still, Smith’s accusations tear down such work. “It has hurt us,” Jones said. “But what this is about is a 19-year-old sophomore who is not happy.”

It is also about trying to win. “That’s the business we’re in,” Jones said. “We’ve got a scoreboard.”