______________________________________________________________________________ ______________________________________________________________________________ THE BANK IS OPEN: AN OVERVIEW OF HOW MURPHY V. NATIONAL COLLEGIATE ATHLETIC ASSOCIATION WILL AFFECT THE NBA AND ITS PLAYERS Shain Roche I. Introduction Professional athletes in the United States make up the majority of the “100 top-earning athletes in the world.”1 Players like National Basketball Association (“NBA”) star LeBron James and National Football League (“NFL”) quarterback Matt Ryan have been handed unprecedented contracts in recent years.2 Even middling NBA players like Chandler Parsons and Joakim Noah have received enormous J.D. Candidate, Suffolk University Law School, 2020; Chief Note Editor, The Journal of High Technology Law, 2018-19; B.A. in Psychology, University of Massachusetts Amherst, 2017. Shain can be reached at
[email protected]. 1 See Kurt Badenhausen, The World’s Highest-Paid Athletes, FORBES (June 11, 2019), archived at https://perma.cc/CTQ8-QHCL (noting that out of the world’s 100 top-earning athletes of 2019, sixty-two of them are Americans). 2 See id. (listing LeBron James’s $85.5 million and Matt Ryan’s $67.3 million salaries for 2018, both of which landed in the top ten salaries among athletes in the world for that year). For comparison, perhaps the greatest basketball player of all time, Michael Jordan, signed a contract with the NBA’s Chicago Bulls in 1988 that paid him $25 million over the course of eight years. See Jordan Signs 8-Year Contract with Bulls, LOS ANGELES TIMES (Sept. 21, 1988), archived at https://perma.cc/J9HF-Y4RL. To compare the $67.3 million Matt Ryan earned in the 2017-18 season to earnings of past NFL players, the entire Pittsburgh Steelers team earned, collectively, just $13.1 million.