The University of Texas (UT) recently agreed to a 20-year, $300 million deal with ESPN to distribute its soon-to-be-launched TV network. The channel will feature at least one football game and eight men’s basketball games each season, along with high school and nonrevenue UT sporting events, coverage of lectures and guest speakers, and other Texas-centric programming. It will also give Texas a significant—and arguably unfair—advantage over every other school in the country, and creates a situation that just begs for action from the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA).

Let’s be honest—what school in Texas’s position wouldn’t do the same thing? The Longhorns are the flagship college team in the country’s second-largest state, and it’s hard to refuse an offer to add $300 million to your athletic department’s coffers. And if the other 345 Division I schools find this unfair, they can just follow suit, which they’ll probably do soon enough anyway…right?

Let’s take a look at one of Texas’s prime Big 12 rivals, the University of Kansas. The state of Kansas has a total population of 2,853,116; the city of Houston, meanwhile, is home to 2,257,926 individuals. Somehow I get the feeling ESPN would be just slightly less willing to pay $300 million for the rights to distribute Jayhawk TV. Quite simply, there is no other school in the country that has the perfect combination of attributes (from a network executive’s point of view) like Texas does.

Now, you could certainly make the argument that the Big 12 should follow the model of the Big Ten (and, eventually, the Pac-10) and simply start a conference TV network. While a good idea in principle, the current power dynamics in the Big 12 have created a toxic environment for such a venture. Remember the unending controversy about expansion and the “inevitable” shift to an athletics scene dominated by four 16-team “super-conferences”? The only reason the Big 12 still exists (albeit with only 10 long-term members) is because Texas refused to bolt for the Pac-10…in no small part because of the upcoming Pac-10 television network. Staying in the Big 12 afforded the Longhorns the ability to reap the benefits of their own TV channel, something the Pac-10 could not promise. Without Texas, there is no more Big 12, and every other school still left in the conference knows it.

Plus, a conference TV network simply expands the scale of the problems caused by a single school’s network. Take, for example, the Big Ten Network, which currently reaches roughly 40 million households nationwide. In most areas of Florida, the network is available on the expanded basic cable tier—a nod to the significant number of retirees from the Upper Midwest who vacation or now reside in the Sunshine State. Florida also happens to be one of the most fertile football recruiting grounds in the country. Suppose a coveted gridiron recruit is choosing between Wisconsin and TCU, this year’s Rose Bowl participants. If he attends Wisconsin, his family will have the benefit of a 24/7 cable network run by its conference to follow his athletic exploits. But alas, the Big East (of which TCU will soon be a member) has no such network, and thus far fewer opportunities to watch live game action. Seems like a pretty clear-cut recruiting advantage for Wisconsin, eh?

So what can the NCAA do to correct this inequity? Its best option is to expand the mechanisms it has in place to prevent such an imbalance from occurring. The NCAA, rather than individual schools or conferences, has negotiated a multibillion-dollar contract with CBS and Turner Sports to carry the Division I men’s basketball tournament.

The money from the contract is split among the Division I basketball-playing schools and conferences according to a set formula: One-sixth of the money goes directly to the schools based on how many sports they sponsor, one-third goes to the schools based on the number of scholarships they give out, and the rest goes to the conferences based on their schools’ results in the previous six tournaments. If the NCAA is serious about ensuring a level playing field, it can impose the same structure for football broadcast rights. No Texas TV network, no exclusive Notre Dame-NBC deal, no record-breaking Southeastern Conference-CBS contract. Just a uniform contract with payouts to each school—a model similar to the one used in the NFL, which seems to be working pretty well.

No doubt many schools would (understandably) scream bloody murder if the NCAA tried to switch to such a broadcast structure for football. But if the NCAA is serious about making sure all of its teams compete on a level playing field, this is a step it must take.

And hey, maybe ESPN2 can even find some space in its late-night lineup for those Texas lectures.