"You're running a disingenuous comparison."
Really? How is it disingenuous to compare the major sports with regard to your pointed reference to the need for a hard cap in order to promote competition, despite the fact that each of those sports owners uses a different way to fund themselves?
But, let's see about your premise that "A good comparison time is 94 up."
In the NBA: 5 teams since the '94 Finals.
In the MLB: 6 teams since the '94 World Series.
In the NHL: 5 teams since the '94 Stanley Cup.
In the NFL: 8 teams since the '94 Superbowl.
In NASCAR: 7 drivers since the '94 season.
I'm very curious about how you extract the benefit of a hard cap from even the last 10 or so years? Upon what are you basing your opinion? Surely not recent sporting history.
It's disingenuous to comare the "results" of salary cap by including the 10 years prior to the salary cap, the 10 years in fact that are why the NFL wanted a salary cap in the first place. It artificially weighs the data with completely contrary evidence. If you want to take the 10 years prior to the cap, the era of capless free agency, then you should just do a straight NFL to NFL comparison. The NFL pretty neatly devides into 3 eras: no free agency, free agency without cap, and free agency with cap. When you compare those eras with each other you'll see the middle era had the least competitive balance, even with the Steelers totally skewing the first era's data.
Yes recent sporting history, throw Nascar out because it's a very different kind of team sport and it's nearly impossible to compare to the others in any way, especially because there are different layers of teams, each driver has a team behind him, but there's usually a primary sponsor (like DEI) that forms a team behind the team which makes the picture incredibly cloudy, how many of those different drivers had the same shell team behind them, did any repeats switch teams? Too ugly to contemplate.
So in the other four notice that the NFL has more different teams winning than the other three, also dig into the finances and you'll find that the NFL is the only one of the four showing increases in attendance, TV ratings and overall revenue. Recent sporting history clearly shows that a hard cap is good for competitive balance and high competitive balance is good the sport's revenue.