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Part of the issue is that pro-sports is heavily integrated into American politics. They're a major font of propaganda for the US government, both domestically and internationally. Olympic Athletes of all stripes are regularly recruited to express American jingoism on an international stage. Military recruiters love to camp out at football games and happily sponsor helicopter landings, 21 gun salutes, and jet flyovers. Well-networked candidates use endorsements by athletes and wear team merch in order to signal their popularity to constituents. Athletes even serve as international ambassadors (Dennis Rodman famously visited North Korea, Herschel Walker and Michelle Kwan are both Trump-era ambassadors in the Caribbean, Mo Farah worked with the UN).
And then there's the graft. Politicians regularly get special accommodations from stadium owners in exchange for kickbacks. Athletes and coaches periodically get elevated to run for office (Colin Alred ran for a Texas Senate seat, Tommy Tuberville currently represents Alabama) and use their college/pro-ball networks to raise money for themselves and their political allies. Franchise owners are, themselves, heavily invested in both lowering taxes/cutting regulations and advancing fascistic ideology.
Sorry. Too much money and influence is trading hands. They can't stop. They won't stop.
Yeah I couldn't take the fucking NFL in general anymore. It became exactly like America: overhyped, pricier by the year while being worse every year, full of stupid drama, and obviously has its best years behind it.
Who wants to put up with three hours of shitty beer and truck commercials for 30 minutes of mediocre action? (A lot of America, I guess... But I can't anymore, this frog hopped out of the pot.)
I mean, the biggest problem with NFL is that a team can realistically only play 12-15 games a year. In baseball, you play 10x as many games. Basketball, marginally less, but you can still run a season for six months, with games multiple times a week.
So tickets can be cheaper and the sport can still be more profitable by year.
The high impact sports are a bad business model. Everything runs downstream of that, since you need to compress more and more of your revenue generation into a tighter timeframe.