CHANNEL HYPES MINOR SPORTS.

Byline: TOM HOFFARTH The Media

It's a bowl of mixed nuts without the cashews and almonds, an invitation to join a mail-order CD club without access to rock or country, an episode of ``Charmed'' without Alyssa Milano and Rose McGowan.

Without Division I football and men's basketball games, how are the guys running the new College Sports Television going to survive as the latest all-something 24-hour sports cable channel trying to scratch out a niche?

Because, really, how can you knock someone when they're giving it the new college try?

When it officially launches Monday without much more than the 11 million subscribers of DirecTV as its audience, CSTV will use the men's final of the NCAA Tournament as its springboard, much like The Golf Channel has benefited from its ancillary coverage of The Masters without owning the rights to cover the event live.

From there, CSTV has lined up events with more than two dozen Division I conferences such as the Pacific-10, Big East, Big Ten and Big 12 plus Notre Dame to cover live Olympic-type sports such as baseball, softball, volleyball, soccer and ice hockey, as well as regional favorites water polo, lacrosse and rugby. Game coverage is supposed to be about 40 percent of the programming, along with studio shows (40 percent) and instructional shows (20 percent).

It has Pepperdine, UCLA and USC challenging for the Mountain Pacific Sports Federation volleyball title on April 26. There's a UCLA-Stanford baseball game May 17, and Long Beach State's three-game series against Miami from May 22-25. It also has lined up spring football games for Ohio State, Penn State and Iowa.

Brian Bedol and Steve Greenberg, who co-founded the Classic Sports Network in 1995 before selling it to ESPN two years later, are behind this project along with Chris Bevilacqua, a former senior executive with Nike Inc., who has expertise in marketing with colleges.

``The biggest difference from launching Classic Sports then to now is the cable industry's investment of tens of millions of dollars into upgrading its infrastructure to enable digital technology to be distributed to more customers,'' Bedol said Thursday from his office in New York. ``But it's also more challenging to make inroads because, back then, there were 10 companies that controlled about 60 percent of the cable market, but now there's five who control about 80 percent. So if we succeed, it'll be quicker, and we're fortunate the response has been strong.''

Over time, CSTV might go from a national channel into regionalization, but Bedol also notes research that shows that in some of the major TV markets, 75 percent of the sports fans are displaced from their favorite home teams, so ``there is great value in a national context to make a footprint this way,'' he said.

Randy Rosenbloom, the longtime San Fernando Valley sportscaster who already has two softball assignments for CSTV on April 12 (Cal-Arizona, a rematch of last year's NCAA final) and May 9 (UCLA at Arizona), sees plenty of room on the TV landscape for a channel like this to succeed.

``It'll be interesting to see how Fox and the others react as this channel gobbles up all the additional programming,'' said Rosenbloom, who did the first sporting event broadcast on the Oxygen Channel, an Olympic qualifying women's volleyball match between the U.S. and Canada in January 2000. ``There was also talk once of an all-women's channel, and this really combined a lot of women's sports into a place where it can showcase it.

``Maybe it doesn't have the football and men's basketball games now, but in the years to come, it sure has a chance to get into it with so many universities and conferences available.''

--For the troops: ESPN has established a ``Jocks to GIs Direct'' link on its Web site (sports.espn.go.com/hat/sportsnation/jockstogis/index), inviting those stationed abroad to e-mail athletes such as Shaquille O'Neal, Tiger Woods and Jeff Burton that'll hopefully boost moral when they get a video response that everyone can read and watch.

Meanwhile, NBC's Arena Football League coverage Sunday of the San Jose-Dallas game will go on the Armed Forces radio and TV service (reaching more than 850,000 military personnel home and abroad) as reporter Lewis Johnson interviews family members of deployed servicemen and women in the crowd during the game.

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By Tom Hoffarth