If all of that sounds too good to be true, then you haven't yet heard from Andy Schwarz. A San Francisco–based antitrust economist, longtime critic of college sports amateurism , and—full disclosure—occasional contributor to VICE Sports , Schwarz has a plan to make it happen. It's a business plan , in fact, and while it's still in its early stages, it works, in a nutshell, like this:

What if I told you there was a way to pay men's college basketball players a fairer portion of the hundreds of millions of dollars they generate, boost the flagging fortunes of the nation's historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs), and stick it to the sanctimonious, self-serving quasi-monopolists at the NCAA?

NCAA amateurism rules prohibit all of the above, generally limiting athlete compensation for playing sports to the value of an athletic scholarship: room, board, tuition, and in some cases a small cost-of-attendance stipend. Recently, University of Central Florida kicker Donald De La Haye said that his popular YouTube videos, which depict his daily life as a college athlete and have earned him income, may violate those rules and cost him his eligibility .

They also would be paid to play basketball, between $50,000 and $100,000 a year. Moreover, they would be allowed to endorse products, sell autographs, sign with agents, accept gifts from boosters, declare for the NBA draft, and even be drafted by NBA teams without losing their eligibility.

The way Schwarz and his HBCU league co-founders—Ohio–based sports and entertainment attorney Richard Volante and Washington, D.C.–based author and historian Bijan Bayne—see it, the NCAA is a bit like a traditional taxi company, while their concept is akin to Uber or Lyft. The league would consist of at least 16 members drawn from the four current NCAA Division I and II HBCU conferences, institutions such as Howard University and Florida A&M; its athletes would be full-time students.

"One of the ways to bust up a monopoly is through disruption," Schwarz says. "That's the idea here."

Step 2: Tell the NCAA to pound sand, and pay the nation's very best high school and college basketball players to be part of it.

It also stems from the failure of recent legal challenges to amateurism. A class-action lawsuit brought against the NCAA by former University of California, Los Angeles basketball star Ed O'Bannon over the use of athletes' names, images, and likenesses ended with federal judges finding that the association violates antitrust law, but also ruling that the NCAA can continue to prohibit player pay.

The idea was born out of Schwarz, Volante, and Bayne's frustration with the multibillion-dollar college sports industry, in which NCAA member schools agree not to pay athletes instead of competing and bidding for their services in a free market the way every other industry works, and the way campus athletics work if you're a coach or athletic director.

"We walk through that menu, and then we ask, 'If you're thinking of going to a school outside of our league, ask them if those same possibilities are there.'"

"There's no amateurism," he says. "If we're in a high school recruit's living room, our pitch is that we want to give you a contract for $75,000, with workers' comp, health insurance, and a 401(k). There are opportunities for ancillary revenue on top of that. We offer great campuses and alumni networks. We invite NBA teams to come, and to draft you while you're still in school. If and when you make that jump, we are thrilled for you.

"If you want to disrupt a cartel," Schwarz says, "you need to find someone inside it who is not winning."

The two rulings left Schwarz, who consulted for the plaintiffs on the O'Bannon case, "depressed." But he also perceived an economic opportunity. Cartels like the NCAA form because all members agree they can make more money by colluding with one another than by competing. They break up when some members decide they're getting the short end of the stick and would be better off going head-to-head with their former partners.

Similarly, when a National Labor Relations Board regional director found that Northwestern University football players qualified as school employees under federal labor law and had the right to unionize, the NLRB's national office declined to exercise jurisdiction over the university's appeal of the decision, effectively leaving the unionization effort in limbo.

"In early September, Wide World of Sports would air a game called the Whitney Young Classic between Grambling and Morgan State [another HBCU] at Yankee Stadium," says J. Kenyatta Cavil, a professor at Texas Southern University and an expert on HBCU athletics. "They would air it with the same gravity as a University of Southern California–Notre Dame game."

Enter HBCUs. Once upon a time, schools like Grambling State were sports powerhouses. Widespread racial segregation meant that many of the best African-American athletes, like basketball's Earl "The Pearl" Monroe, starred for black institutions. In the 1970s, Grambling's football team played on national television every week, was viewed by fans as the "black Notre Dame," and had more former players in the NFL than any other school.

While major college sports are an estimated $10 billion-a-year industry, HBCUs see little of that money. An ESPN analysis last year found that Power Five schools made $6 billion in 2014-15, while the Group of Five mid-major conferences accounted for another $2 billion. The total combined revenues for the Mid-Eastern and Southwestern Athletic Conferences that year, according to a USA Today database , were roughly $289 million—a competitive amount when compared to other small-time Division I football conferences, but a pittance compared to the big-time bowl-eligible ones.

"The HBCUs don't have a choice," says Fritz Polite, assistant dean of student affairs at Shenandoah University and a sports management expert. "They have to find some type of alternative method to raise money. The model the NCAA has in place doesn't meet their needs at all. The rich are getting richer."

In 2013, Florida A&M lost at Ohio State 76-0 but collected $900,000, over half of the school's $1.6 million football budget that season. Basketball isn't much different: Mississippi Valley State went on a 14-game, 13-state road trip to start its 2015-16 season, losing all 14 games while earning $600,000.

Four years ago, Grambling State's football team went on strike to protest dangerous, dilapidated athletic facilities; in 2010, Mississippi Valley State's football stadium was deemed so unsafe it was temporarily closed . On the field, the disparities between HBCUs and other Division I programs can best be seen during "guarantee games"—that is, when HBCU teams play road games against major programs and get throttled in exchange for cash.

Desegregation has since drained the HBCU athletic talent pool. Over time, schools like Morgan State and Florida A&M have fallen further and further behind bigger and richer primarily white institutions (PWIs), and in particular the members of the NCAA's Power Five conferences.

The lack of funding makes it harder for HBCU athletic programs to keep up in the classroom, too. In an attempt to measure educational quality, the NCAA uses a metric called Academic Progress Rate (APR), which is rooted in athletes' course completion and grade point average. Two seasons ago, all 23 teams punished with postseason ineligibility by the NCAA due to low APR scores were from HBCUs.

A 2015 Washington Post story explored how the NCAA system leaves HBCUs stuck between what Polite calls "a rock and a hard place." On one hand, the schools have a historical mission to educate the poorest and least academically prepared students, including athletes; on the other, they have scant resources to do so. As the Post put it:

HBCUs typically can't afford for their athletes to attend summer classes. They have far fewer academic advisers to provide oversight. Unlike power conference schools, HBCUs can't afford enough NCAA compliance officers to effectively navigate waivers for exemptions, or offer guaranteed scholarships that allow athletes who leave school early to return to get their degrees and boost a slumping score.

Howard has two full-time academic advisers for approximately 350 athletes. At Morgan State, the only academic adviser listed on the athletic department's online staff directory is also an assistant cheerleading coach. But schools in the power five conferences often have an academic counselor devoted to football and men's basketball and one for every three to four of the institution's other sports.

The NCAA's Accelerating Academic Success Program offers "resource-limited" schools grants of up to $900,000 over three-year periods to fund academic support for athletes. But Polite says that when he and other members of the academic and athletic community wrote a joint letter to the association in 2012 urging changes to the APR process and greater redistribution of money away from Power Five schools and toward HBCUs and other have-nots, the NCAA "didn't take any of our recommendations and they never invited us back."

"If you sat the [HBCU] presidents down and asked them truthfully, a lot of them would say the system is not benefiting them," Cavil says. "But I think they don't see any better options."

Schwarz and his partners believe they can provide one. A basketball league featuring the nation's top collegiate talent—the future NBA players who currently attend schools like Duke University and the University of Kentucky—could provide a much-needed shot in the arm to HBCU athletics as a whole. It also could benefit member schools in general through what some economists have called "the Flutie Effect," in which high-profile athletic success spurs a virtuous, school-lifting cycle of better branding, improved alumni giving, increased and more selective enrollment, and more overall excitement.