Supposedly none of this has to do with pay (from the NFL's point of view), but has to do with wanting to set up a referee college, where they can train refs directly instead of the current process, where you pretty much have to start as a high school ref, and then move up to the college level starting with D3/FCS and then moving up through the ranks until you can ref BCS bowl level games, and then move up to NFL; and by that time you're "really old" and can't move around as easily; and the NFL wants younger refs that are going to stay with the league for a longer period of time... but they still don't want to pay them enough that they'll be able to not have to have normal jobs on the side.
Meanwhile, the league is trying to run this initiative to have people who are thrown out of stadiums be required to pay $75 for a 4-hour online class on proper behavior before they're allowed back into a stadium; and the first (highly publicized) example of some fans who're going to have to go through that to get back into Century Link Stadium to watch the Seahawks are a group of off-duty Bellevue PD officers who got drunk and rowdy before the game, got into an altercation with an on-duty Seattle PD officer outside the stadium, were allowed to continue on to the game (because there was no crime committed when one of them littered, refused to pick up the trash and dispose of it properly, and then started a fight with the SPD officer that was heated enough that backup had to be called - littering, public drunkenness, disturbing the peace, resisting arrest) and once inside the stadium refused to stop swearing and carrying on and then threatened another fan with "you better not get pulled over in Bellevue, we're Bellevue cops," when asked to stop swearing so much because they guy was there with his kid, and had to be escorted out of the stadium by security (all the while flashing their badges and shouting "we're cops").
It's going to be an ugly, ugly year.