The players may have "won" concessions on free agency, but the imposition of the salary cap means a lot of players don't earn much more than the league minimum.
Fair enough. Point taken. I don’t begrudge players making a decent salary, although I guess that’s somewhat subjective. As a consumer, I would like to see more of a uniform merit based pay schedule. For those players who achieve star status popularity, make all the money you can make from endorsements. More power to them. The problem is the system too often encourages bad or selfish behavior from players.
The whole system is a myriad of conflicted interests. For example, why do you think it’s so hard to discipline players regarding something that should normally be completely uncontroversial? (i.e. making them stand for the national anthem). Companies in every industry enforce basic behavioral standards on their employees without any controversy. One of the problems is you have individual team owners in charge of disciplining their own teams. What might be good policy for the league as a whole (making players stand for the national anthem) might be bad for an individual team if it means sidelining one of their better players. An owner whose team has a chance to make the playoffs is unlikely to willingly sideline a key player even if doing so would be the right thing. So, there’s all kinds of conflicts of interest like this in the NFL, which players have learned to exploit.