Success Quote by Wellington Mara

There is a particular kind of corporate tragedy embedded in Mara's phrasing: not the collapse itself, but the delayed perception of collapse. "The bottom started to drop out" is recession-speak turned tactile, a floor giving way beneath people who assumed it was load-bearing. The telling clause is the second half: "we didn't recognize it". That's not ignorance as innocence; it's misrecognition as a management failure, an indictment of how institutions train themselves to see stability even when the data is screaming otherwise.

Mara, a businessman and longtime NFL owner, is talking in the plural on purpose. "We" spreads responsibility across a boardroom, a league office, maybe even a fan base that preferred continuity to panic. It's the language of collective blind spots: incentives that reward optimism, internal cultures that punish the messenger, the comfort of legacy metrics that keep working right up until they don't. The sentence implies the drop was gradual at first - subtle enough to be rationalized, to be explained away as a blip, to be met with the managerial equivalent of turning up the radio.

It also works as a soft confession. Mara doesn't say, "we ignored it", which would be moral failure. He says, "we didn't recognize it", which reads like an appeal for understanding while still conceding culpability. That's the subtext: collapse rarely announces itself with trumpets. It arrives as a series of small denials that look, in the moment, like prudence.