“We had invited him in several times to have the conversation, to have the dialogue,” Goodell said in the video posted Sunday. “I wish we had the benefit of that. We never did. And we would’ve benefited from that, absolutely.”

Goodell also said that players kneeling is “not about the flag” and that their intentions are being “mischaracterized.”

“These are not people who are unpatriotic. They’re not disloyal. They’re not against our military,” Goodell said. “In fact, many of those guys were in the military, and they’re a military family. And what they were trying to do is exercise their right to bring attention to something that needs to get fixed. And that misrepresentation of who they were and what they were doing was the thing that really gnawed at me.”