“This is about education,” Smith said. “It’s not about Big Brother. It’s about helping young people become managers of their assets. It’s a financial literacy program.”

Smith stressed that Ohio State would not ask players to “show me your grocery list and go over every line.” But where he saw this as educational, others saw more oversight, a way to protect the Buckeyes from rule violations, which tarnish the reputation of universities and lead to millions of dollars in lost revenue. Players who do not budget properly, Smith said, “would be more likely to look for opportunities to solve their financial problems.”

In a telephone interview, Smith repeatedly cited “Broke,” the documentary, part of ESPN’s “30 for 30” series, that highlighted in stark, heartbreaking detail the financial woes many athletes faced in retirement. Smith said he wanted to avoid such endings for Ohio State athletes.

To which Billy Corben, the director of “Broke,” said, “I’m flattered and offended.” Flattered because he hoped athletes and those who advise them would watch the documentary and pay more attention to their finances before they turned professional.

Offended because “anything that has to do with N.C.A.A. compliance is cynical,” Corben said.

He added: “It has to be. Because they are attempting to enforce and comply with rules that we all know to be fundamentally unfair to the student-athlete. They have a moral, ethical, contractual obligation to better educate those students. But they cannot infringe on their basic rights as an individual, as an American, rights that other Ohio State students enjoy. Not to make sure they’re not taking money from anybody.”

Ohio State disagreed with this characterization. Gates Garrity-Rokous, the university’s chief compliance officer, said that it needed to help its athletes beyond what the N.C.A.A. required, that it had to “think about them in a more complete way.”

Robert H. Schottenstein, a member of the board of trustees at Ohio State since 2005, added: “The biggest take-away from what happened with our football team is that the single most precious asset any institution has is our reputation. You cannot put too great a value on how important it is to protect that. Compliance is the tangible guardian of that reputation.”