CYBERSPORTS USC BASKETBALL TEAM A PART OF NET HOOP HISTORY.

Byline: - Tom Hoffarth

It might not cause a tidal wave of Web surfing, but the 12-game Pearl Harbor Invitational at the Brigham Young campus in Hawaii this week will be a first - a Division I basketball tournament to be broadcast live over the Internet.

That's because Yahoo! Sports (http://sports.yahoo.com) has signed on as the title sponsor and will do live streaming video and a separate audio feed from the tournament, which runs Thursday through Saturday.

USC competes in the field against host BYU-Hawaii on Thursday at 11 p.m. For more info on the tournament, check the BYU-Hawaii site (www.byuh.edu/sports/phi).

--Yahoo! founders David Filo and Jerry Yang are No. 67 on The Sporting News' list released last week of the 100 Most Powerful People in Sports (www.sportingnews.com/features/powerful).

Other sports Internet bigwigs on the list are George Bodenheimer (president of ESPN, which includes ESPN.com, at No. 12), Steve Case (chairman of AOL Time Warner, at No. 16) and Michael Levy (founder and CEO of CBS Sportsline, No. 75).

--Yahoo! has been told by the NFL that it has to take advertisements for gambling sites off its Internet portal if it wants to keep its happy relationship with the league.

Yahoo! presents radio broadcasts of games and auctions of NFL merchandise, part of a partnership that began in October. The ads for online casinos and sites that offer tips to sports bettors were not up when the partnership was announced, NFL spokesman Brian McCarthy said. He said league officials found out about the ads last week.

--By the time Sunday's Bears-49ers game ended, almost 200 signatures were added to a Web site petition intended to reach Chicago Bears management, requesting the permanent banishment of quarterback Cade McNown (www.tradecade.com). That brings the total number of protesters to about 12,300 since the site went up Nov. 10.