IT'S BIG BUSINESS---AND IT STINKS.

I just saw the news flash that Jim Tresell has resigned as football coach at Ohio State. All I can say is, it's about time, and he has done the right thing. I suspect he was "encouraged" by the O.S.U. administration as well as pressure from the N.C.A.A. Ohio State's reputation as a football factory with the win-at-any-cost philosophy should be an embarrassment to a host of Buckeye alumni and subway fans.

I hope---but wonder---if this scandal will change the ethics in Columbus. College football is big business everywhere, but none more so than at that mega-monster called the Buckeyes. I have always been a rooter for Ohio State from childhood when my father took me to games but have become increasingly dismayed as the Tresell and his players scandal erupted and further bespoiled the moral landscape. Tresell is symptomatic of the problem besetting college football, no longer a game but one helluva big business. Tresell has plenty of company in the ammoral and usually immoral world of college football where winning anyway possible is the basic tenet.

Alumni and rabid fans have to take their share of the blame. There are few more obnoxious sights in the world than a group of Buckeyes in a bar, screaming and being total asses. They give real meaning to the term chauvinists (not in the sexist sense). We have our share of them here on my Florida island. The pressure to win and the under-the-table "gifts" to players create the wrong moral climate. Maybe the Big Ten has the right idea to end this hypocrisy by allowing the players to accept some "expense money". It's happening anyway, a fact of life.

But I still get hung up on one fact: it's still a damn game, even before it was a business. The Jim Tressells of the world are always around, and, unfortunately, so are the college administrators who look the other way and are busy counting the mega bucks. I suppose, with the prohibitive cost of colleges today, they love to keep that money flowing in.

The word "amateur" derived from the Latin "amare"---to love. It is naive and obsolete to expect sports players and watchers to be pure lovers of the game, especially when many coaches and players do it for money. There's a name for that, too---prostitution.

Morality. I should have known, interferes with profit. Just another sign of my age.