(This piece originally appeared on NBCOlympics.com on August 8, 2012.)

These are dark times for college basketball aficionados. The start of the season is more than three months away, and even hardcore hoops fans can admit that March seems like a distant memory.

Have no fear, bracketologists, handball is here. The sport is exciting, fast-paced, and now in the final week of the Olympic tournament, every game becomes crucial. Reminds us of another prominent event: the NCAA Basketball Tournament.

1. Sudden Death – With the start of knockout-round play, it’s single-elimination style just like the NCAA Tournament. Look for handball Cinderellas like Tunisia to knock a strong Croatian team into a long, four-year wait until the next Olympics in the late game Tuesday.

2. Tight, physical defense – The importance lock-down defense is more similar to college basketball than to the NBA regular season. Even the short Korean team got physical, getting hands on shots and climbing taller players like trees. And the crashing of bodies for rebounds reminds us of the ruthless interior play of Big East teams.

3. Don’t know the names? Doesn’t matter – No one will blame you for not knowing the starting lineup of Syracuse or Iceland, but players fit into archetypes, like Ivan Cupic of Croatia. One of the shortest guys on the court, Cupic weaves through defenses to drive opponents batty — like that pesky, quick-shooting guard your team can’t stop. As one of the top goal-scorers, his post-goal fist pumps are a gut-punch to opposing goalkeepers.

4. A college atmosphere with international flair – It’s all neutral for the knockout round since the Brits are eliminated. But fans have gathered from across Europe to give the matches a college basketball feel, especially the loud, chanting Hungarian fans who drape the Copper Box in green and red.There’s even schadenfreude: Denmark fans in the crowd rooting for Korea to defeat their European rivals. Big tournaments create strange international bedfellows.

5. Love for the ladies – While the focus may be on the men’s tournament, don’t forget the women’s games happening on opposite days. The games have been entertaining and a demonstration of parity: Even Denmark, which won three straight Gold medals from 1996 through 2004, missed the knockout round with a 1-4 record.

6. More eyeballs, higher volume – Just like college basketball teams usually move from smaller gyms to NBA arenas in March, so will handball teams. For the men’s knockout round and the women’s final four the games shift from the cozy 5,000-seat Copper Box to the 12,000-seat Basketball Arena. If the cheers from crazed Hungarians didn’t destroy your ears during the preliminary round, the decibel level is about to double.

7. The gym teacher X-factor – Basketball fans know that gym teacher James Naismith invented the game to keep students in shape during winter. Handball may have its origins in ancient Rome and Greece, but Denmark’s Holger Nielsen created the first set of rules in 1904 and Germany’s Karl Schelenz developed the modern rules 15 years later. One guess at what their occupations were.

8. Watch early, watch often – One of the best aspects of being at the NCAA tournament and Olympic handball tournaments is watching games all day long, at the stadium or a screen. All of the games are streaming live at NBCOlympics.com. Just make sure to hide the video box from your boss, March Madness-style.

The Trojans have not put a winning team on the field since 2005. (Photo Credit: Shotgun Spratling/College Baseball Daily)

There are many reasons USC named its baseball stadium after Rod Dedeaux. He spent 45 years as head coach. He won an unmatched 11 College World Series titles, including five in a row from 1970 to 1974. He was named Baseball America’s “Coach of the Century.”

But many of the students who came through USC during his tenure from 1942 to 1986 probably appreciate one thing most: the free beers.

“Rod Dedeaux used to buy a keg and set it behind the visitor’s dugout,” says Steve Lopes, USC’s chief operating officer and chief financial officer. “Red cups in the stands. A couple hundred kids would show up.”

Not that USC baseball necessarily needed a steady flow of alcohol to be enjoyed while Dedeaux was head coach. He won 70 percent of his games, helped to develop 59 Major League players and led the Trojans to 28 conference titles.

“They were like the Celtics winning championships in basketball,” says Aaron Fitt, national college baseball writer for Baseball America. “They were royalty in college baseball.”

But the kings have lost their crown in recent years. The Trojans have not had a winning season since 2005, the longest drought for a school that has been playing baseball since 1889. In those seven years, they have produced just two Baseball America All-Americans after having 10 such players the previous eight years. The baseball powerhouse has become a lightweight, but why?

In 1976, Los Angeles Times columnist Jim Murray wrote that Dedeaux’s USC program was “the greatest farm club in the history of the major leagues… and the most consistent supplier of major league talent the past 10.” Over the last several years, though, USC has not been able to get top high school players to the “farm club,” and the team on the field floundered to the longest span in Trojans history without making the NCAA Tournament.

Public vs. Private

“The lifeblood of our athletics program is recruiting,” Lopes says. “You get the best players, you’ll win the most of the games.”

College baseball programs are limited to 11.7 scholarships per team (not per year, per team), but can give student-athletes anywhere from a 1-percent scholarship to a full ride. College baseball teams usually carry more players than the 25-man rosters in Major League Baseball. With so few scholarships to give out, private schools like USC are often at a disadvantage.

The majority of scholarships given out are 25 percent or 50 percent. Trojans head coach Dan Hubbs may go into a player’s home and offer a half-scholarship to play for USC. It’s not bad, but then the player’s parents still have to pay about $25,000 per year for him to attend the university.

When UCLA head coach John Savage offers a half-scholarship to a California native, the remaining cost for parents is only $16,101 per year, going by estimated student budgets provided by UCLA. That difference of $36,000 over four years can have a substantial impact in a student-athlete’s choice of school, and public universities like UC Irvine (six straight NCAA Tournament appearances from 2006 to 2011) and Cal State Fullerton (seven College World Series appearances since 1999) can reap the benefits of recruiting athletes from the high school baseball hotbed of California and being a less expensive option than USC.

However, college baseball is not completely dominated by public schools. Universities like Stanford, Rice and Vanderbilt consistently build quality teams despite expensive tuitions and the same 11.7-scholarship limit.

Stanford is the most unique school in Division I, Lopes says. He cites the university’s ability to offer a full scholarship to any accepted student with a single parent making less than $60,000 or a family making less than $120,000. The same goes for potential players at Rice who come from certain income levels. A questionnaire on the Rice Athletics website asks potential recruits to identify family income level: Less than $80,000; Between $80,000 to $120,000; Between $120,000 to $150,000; and Greater than $150,000. The need-based academic scholarships they can offer do not take any slice of the 11.7 baseball scholarships each program has.

“It takes their athletic dollars much further,” Lopes said.

Schools can’t combine acadmeic aid and athletic aid, so USC Athletics could not piece together a half-tuition academic merit scholarship with a half-tuition baseball scholarship to create a full ride. Rice and Vanderbilt, like Stanford are all have smaller student bodies and a larger endowment per undergraduate than USC, giving those schools a better ability to offer academic aid.

(Source: National Association of College and University Business Officers and Commonfund Institute)

But California’s public universities have been less expensive than USC for decades, and it did not stop the Trojans from being one of the powerhouses of college baseball.

“USC doesn’t have quite the same academic reputation as Vanderbilt and Stanford, but there’s no reason USC shouldn’t be able to find talent,” says Shotgun Spratling, who covers the Southern California region for College Baseball Daily. “There are plenty of players that come from families living comfortably enough for the tuition difference at a private school to not be an overwhelming burden.”

One decision in particular changed the program’s fortunes over the last decade.

A Short-Lived Head Coach

Mike Gillespie led USC’s baseball teams to the NCAA Regionals 15 times in 20 seasons as the Trojans head coach, making four appearances in the College World Series. He “retired” from the program after the 2006 season, only to be hired at UC Irvine less than 16 months later.

His retirement was more likely a case of being forced out after only one winning season in his last four years as head coach. However Gillespie was relieved of duties, the team was taken over by his son-in-law Chad Kreuter, a former USC catcher who played in the Major Leagues and had minor league managing experience before returning to Troy.

Despite Kreuter’s professional baseball experience, he had never been a head coach at the college level, and he quickly had problems getting top players to USC.

“He didn’t know what he was doing,” Fitt says. “I hate to put it so bluntly, but when it comes down to it, he didn’t know how to recruit to the college game… It was an unmitigated disaster.”

Fitt says Kreuter’s focus was on recruiting big-name players. The problem was, he says, most of those guys had “no chance of showing up to school” over signing a pro contract out of high school.

“So then they were decimated the next fall,” Fitt says. “None of the guys showed up. It’s just not how you win in college baseball, and he never quite got it.”

Another issue with bringing in Kreuter was that he had been around pro baseball for so long that he had no sense of how college coaches bring in high school players.

“How does he know where the recruits are? How does he evaluate talent or have a network of [high school] head coaches?” Lopes asks. “You need a network of people who have built relationships.”

Poor recruiting classes led to a disastrous four-year stint for Kreuter. His teams went 39-63 in conference play, never finishing better than fifth in the Pac-10 conference. Meanwhile, Gillespie’s UC Irvine teams continued the success started by former head coach Dave Serrano. Gillespie went 69-27 in conference play and led the Anteaters to the NCAA Tournament in each of his first four seasons at the helm.

“Mike Gillespie is one of the great coaches in college baseball, certainly the most respected coach in the West Coast,” Fitt says. “They always talk about how Gillespie gets the most out of his players and his team is just so well coached.”

Building Back Up

USC is still recovering from Chad Kreuter’s tenure, even though he was fired in August 2010. “The cupboards were bare,” as Fitt puts it, for new skipper Frank Cruz. After coaching as an assistant under Gillespie from 1993 to 1996, Cruz was the head coach for 12 seasons at nearby Loyola Marymount, then served as a volunteer assistant under Kreuter. He became USC’s interim head coach in 2011 after Kreuter was fired. The team continued to flounder during Cruz’s two seasons (including an 8-22 Pac-12 record in 2012, the most conference losses for USC since 1985).

Cruz was fired just days before the start of the 2013 season for “knowingly violating” NCAA rules that restrict the amount of time players can participate in activities supervised by coaches. That left the Trojans in the hands of Dan Hubbs. It is his first college head-coaching job, but unlike Kreuter, Hubbs brings 13 years of experience as an assistant at Cal and USC.

It continues be slow going for the Trojans this year, with a 12-20 record and a 5-7 mark in Pac-12 play.

“He’s made some questionable decisions, which is to be expected of a coach without much experience in this role,” Spratling says. “But he wasn’t dealt a full hand.”

Though Hubbs is not labeled “interim” head coach like Cruz was, Lopes says he will be evaluated after the season. His successful run as Cal’s pitching coach is certainly a mark in his favor, according to Fitt. Hubbs is in charge of a roster with 16 true freshmen that is still hovering in the bottom half of the Pac-12 conference.

“They’re not overly talented, they’re very young in certain areas,” Fitt says. “But they battle, and I think that’s a sign of good coaching and a program I think is headed in the right direction.”

The pedigree of great college baseball is unmistakable at USC. Fans see it every time they walk up to the stadium. Banners marking the Trojans’ 12 National Championships line Mark McGwire Way as people approach the entrance to Dedeaux Field. They see the face of Gillespie on the scoreboard, the only other man besides Dedeaux to lead USC to a College World Series title.

The history of the USC baseball program is obvious, from the beer-soaked National Championship days of Dedeaux to the success of Gillespie. Now it is time for Hubbs to live up to it.

(Justin Matlock/Creative Commons)

College football fans had been waiting years for it. College presidents had talked around it. Coaches and players longed for it. Last June, it was finally confirmed.

Playoff.

It was the word everyone was waiting to hear, and starting with the 2014 season, college football will have a playoff for its national championship after more than a decade of determining a winner with the Bowl Championship Series.

The new system will not look like basketball’s 68-team March Madness, though, nor any of the other large-scale tournaments the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) uses to decide a champion in most of its 22 sports. Instead, football will have just a four-team playoff; three games in a winner-take-all.

Such a small playoff means college football’s unique postseason setup will remain in place: 35 “bowl games” played in by 70 teams that finished the regular season with at least a .500 record (fewer losses than wins). The bowl system, originating from the inaugural 1902 Rose Bowl game in Pasadena, sees bowl organizing committees paying conferences for their member teams to end the season in the December or January games.

The conferences (think Big Ten, ACC, Pac-12) then divvy the money to their members, even those that did not make a bowl game after a losing season. For the schools that go bowling, the trip can become a costly endeavor. Bowl-bound schools have to pay the travel expenses and hotel costs for their team, coaches and marching band, though that is common for every road game they play.

The real costs often come in the form of ticket guarantees; schools are allotted thousands of game tickets that are theirs to sell. When the team is playing in a prestigious bowl like the Rose Bowl or National Championship, or in a highly-anticipated matchup close to home, the allotments are a blessing. Schools playing in these types of games can sell out of tickets.

Then there’s the curse. If a school accepts an invitation to play in a bowl far away, a low-profile game or a bowl in which they had recently participated, fewer fans shell out the money to travel and attend the game.

DATA: See the numbers we compiled from the tax forms of non-profit bowl games.

From 2004 to 2011, 307 Division I Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS) football teams reported breaking even or losing money on the season, according to data provided by the schools to the federal Office of Postsecondary Education. Of those 307 teams, 98 played in bowl games after a season that was a financial break-even or loss.

Keep in mind, many of these 98 teams represented schools that are rarely financial winners on the gridiron. For example, every year from 2004 to 2011 the University of Memphis football program reported breaking even or losing money. There were two seasons in which the Tigers made a bowl game and broke even, and also two seasons in which the Tigers made a bowl and lost money. The team’s postseason status did not greatly alter the bottom line, and that fact is true of many lower-tier programs in Division I FBS.

However, large public schools going to “elite” BCS bowls can feel the impact of ticket requirements. In recent years, West Virginia and Virginia Tech lost money to play in the Orange Bowl in Miami Gardens, according to a report by the Los Angeles Times. The bowl allots 17,500 tickets to each participating school, meaning almost half the stadium’s seats have to be sold by the two schools.

Another example of “big bowls” meaning big costs is that of the University of Connecticut. Over the last decade, the largest financial loss the Connecticut Huskies underwent came in the 2010-11 football season, when the Huskies made the Fiesta Bowl in Glendale, Arizona. Despite filling their home stadium to 95 percent capacity during the regular season, Connecticut could only sell 2,771 of their 17,500 Fiesta Bowl tickets, according to the school newspaper. Despite a winning season on the field, the football team ended the fiscal year with a loss of $1,534,938.

Keep in mind that a school’s inability to sell tickets does not necessarily represent fan apathy, just the free market. The face value for Orange Bowl tickets run from $75 to $250, but smart shoppers could get in to the stadium via secondary ticket sellers like StubHub, where the budget-conscious fan could buy a seat for as low as $48.

Money Maker for Committees

While schools often lose money in the process of accepting a bowl invitation and playing in the game, the bowl committees themselves come out stronger financially.

We analyzed the tax forms of 12 non-profit bowl committees since 2005, ranging from high-profile games like the Rose Bowl, mid-tier games like the Sun Bowl and smaller games like the GoDaddy.com Bowl.

For the 90 games studied, 68 turned a profit for the fiscal year. Since 2005, all 12 bowl committees have seen at least a 7 percent rise in net assets, and more than half the committees have doubled their net assets.

Translation: all of the bowl committees studied have more financial assets than they did in 2005 (before the economic downturn), some substantially more. It should be no surprise that about half the bowl games in college football were founded in the last 16 years. It seems to be a good financial proposition.

Bowl games are gaining strength financially at a time when attendance at the games is actually dropping. The average attendance for the most recent bowl games was 49,222 fans per game, the lowest average since 1978-79 according to an analysis by Jon Solomon of AL.com.

Last season, 33 of the 35 bowl games were televised by Disney-owned ESPN, ESPN2 or ABC. However, ESPN is no longer just in the business of showing the bowl games on TV. Not all bowls are run by non-profit committees bringing the games to their hometowns. ESPN Regional Television now owns and operates seven annual bowl games. Operating even one bowl game is an expensive project. Our analysis showed annual expenses for non-profit bowl committees running from $2.8 million (New Orleans Bowl) to $17 million (Orange Bowl).

ESPN is not a non-profit, of course. They are in the business of making money via commercials and distribution fees to cable networks. And with the broadcast rights for bowl games climbing higher and higher, it would appear ESPN has found it a better business decision to run the show itself.

For the Cotton Bowl, a Staff Handsomely Paid

Any conversation about schools being required to take on millions of dollars in bowl ticket obligations cannot be complete without pointing out that some bowl executives make far more than their counterparts running Division I athletic departments.

The average annual compensation for “current officers, directors, trustees, and key employees” for bowl games is about 5.5 percent of total expenses, according to the bowls’ Tax Form 990s. One bowl is an outlier in compensating its staff, the AT&T Cotton Bowl Classic in Texas.

Keep in mind that the Cotton Bowl game is no longer played at the Cotton Bowl stadium, the depression-era venue in Dallas’ Fair Park. Starting with the 2010 contest, the Cotton Bowl classic was moved to $1.3-billion Cowboys Stadium in Arlington. The Cotton Bowl stadium now hosts a new game called the Heart of Dallas Bowl.

Confusing enough for you?

During the first year at Cowboys Stadium, Cotton Bowl Classic officials were paid $701,545, or 6.4 percent of the bowl’s total expenses, according to the Form 990 filed by the bowl. Two years later in 2012, officials were paid $1,754,937, or 15.1 percent of total expenses. That percentage was the largest we found of any bowl game since 2005.

It’s important to note, at least in the case of the Cotton Bowl Classic, the millions are not doled out to executives to run one game per year. For the 2013 season, the officials will also organize two regular season contests at Cowboys Stadium, Louisiana State vs. Texas Christian on Aug. 31 and Notre Dame vs. Arizona State on Oct. 5.

In 2014, Cotton Bowl officials are in charge of Texas vs. UCLA, Arkansas vs. Texas A&M and Florida State vs. Oklahoma State before hosting the National Championship Game on Jan. 12, 2015.

“That’s almost a regular season worth of games,” said Michael Konradi, vice president of external affairs for the Cotton Bowl.

Hosting four college football games does not exactly match up to the six regular season home games schools usually host, it represents more than the one Outback Bowl game organized by the Tampa Bay Bowl Association. CEO Jim McVay was paid a compensation package of $814,935 in the fiscal year 2012. That figure was second among bowl officials behind Cotton Bowl CEO’s total package of $1,028,280.

To compare that to other non-profits in college athletics, 100 of the 114 athletic directors of Division I FBS schools earn less than McVay’s compensation package, according to research done by USA TODAY. Athletic directors are the heads of athletic departments for schools, with responsibilities for many sports beyond football.

Ticket Revenue, Attendance Sometimes Don’t Line Up

An example of curious accounting for bowl games can be found in the ticket sales revenue reported by the GoDaddy.com Bowl in Mobile, Alabama, formerly the GMAC Bowl. For three straight years (2006 to 2008), the bowl reported ticket sales of exactly $1,375,926 on each tax Form 990. Such a figure could be accurate if the GMAC Bowl had filled 40,000-seat Ladd-Peebles Stadium with fans. It did not.

• 2005 GMAC Bowl (tax report 2006): 35,422
• 2007 GMAC Bowl: 38,751
• 2008 GMAC Bowl: 36,932

The 2009 GMAC Bowl reported ticket sales of $1,375,927 (up one dollar) before the sales numbers changed to lower figures in later years. The two possibilities are that GMAC Bowl officials had fudged the ticket revenues on their tax forms, or the revenue was counting thousands of seats sold to schools that went unused.

GoDaddy.com Bowl officials were not available for comment.

A Change Afoot?

The ticket requirements will not be changing for the 2013-14 bowl season. The contracts which line out obligations for ticket sales are agreed upon by the bowls and the conferences, not the individual schools. But after this season, the so-called “bowl cycle” of rotating the National Championship game resets, opening the door for the establishment of the four-team College Football Playoff. Conferences will have a chance to renegotiate their bowl contracts.

“Conferences have the leverage right now,” the Cotton Bowl’s Konradi said.

In addition, bowl directors expect a change in team selection in the contract renegotiations. Traditionally, individual bowl committees have controlled which teams to invite. New contracts could give more power to the conferences to assign where member schools play their postseason games.

With the conferences in control, it is more likely that future bowl designations will better match the financial needs of member schools. In 2008, 2009 and 2011, Virginia Tech lost money playing in the Orange Bowl in Miami. According to university records analyzed by The Arizona Republic, the school would have lost a total of $5.1 million over the three games, but the Atlantic Coast Conference absorbed the cost for several thousand tickets.

Even with the financial hit, schools continue to accept bowl invitations for any number of reasons. There is still prestige involved for many of the bowl games, and the television exposure can help with recruiting players. In addition, teams are only allowed to practice after the end of the regular season in early December if they make a bowl game. Even if the contest is a low-tier game, coaches get more instruction time and full practices to prepare their team for the following season, as NCAA rules limit teams to 15 spring practices in March and April.

Still, with our analysis finding that about one-third of Division I FBS football teams in any given season show no profit, schools may be faced with tough decisions if the financial burden is too much to bear to go bowling.