I honestly don't know about the Tebow thing. If you dig up any information on that, please let me know. The military, circa 2015, was paying teams 10 or 15 million dollars for "patriotic displays" before games. Basically paid advertising for the military. I remember John McCain complaining that the DOD spent at least 10 million and there was no paper trail for big chunks, so he was kind of against it without better accounting.

I feel like the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines all have their own flags, so if people were to diss those flags, it could be construed as anti-military. But the US flag is not a military flag, so a protestation of the US flag is showing minimal disrespect to the armed services because what one see when one looks at a US flag is personal and idiosyncratic. One person sees a military icon representing hundreds of thousands of lives lost to preserve the values of the United States. Another sees an icon representing hundreds of thousands of black lives lost to slavery that created the financial backbone of the United States. Both views are valid.