[I wrote this a while ago, but never posted it. Then I saw Mark Paxson’s post today and thought “why the heck not?”]

Pericles was an ancient Greek politician who presided over what is sometimes referred to as the “Golden Age of Athens”. During this period, the Athenians made many artistic and architectural achievements that are still admired in Western Civilization.

However, what sometimes gets neglected is that Pericles also presided over the end of the Golden Age, and the beginning of the Peloponnesian War. The Greek city-states turned against one another, and Athens collapsed into war and plague, the latter of which killed Pericles himself.

“Life”, as the commercials say, “comes at you fast.”

What’s this got to do with NFL commissioner Roger Goodell?

Well, he presided over the Golden Age of Football in the United States. The NFL drew huge viewership numbers and was easily the most lucrative of the major professional sports during his tenure. In his tenure, American football has gone global, and stadiums have become bigger and more ornate than ever. Even the NFL’s premier event has changed from being a predictable blowout that it used to be into, more often than not, a highly-competitive and exciting game.

But now, the end of that Golden Age is at hand. A lot of it is the self-inflicted hubris of all great powers: from making teams play awful games on Thursday nights (dressed in hideous uniforms to boot) despite the fact that players and fans alike hate it, to relocating beloved teams to richer, but less football-loving markets, the NFL’s own greed now works against it.

And then there are political divisions that turn the organization on itself. The National Anthem controversy has made the league a lightning rod for criticism, and it has reacted by trying to come up with a “compromise” that has angered people on both sides of the issue.

Then there are the concussions, which are causing fewer children to take up the sport in the first place. The NFL’s supply of gladiators to feed to the brutal sport is drying up, and so they are changing rules to try to compensate. In the process, they are destroying football in order to save it.

For all these reasons, I think the NFL is in sharp decline, and that it will soon cease to be the dominant sports league in America. And yet, it was only a few years ago that it appeared to be an invincible juggernaut.

OK, maybe this post is a little unfair to Pericles. Although he and Athens fell on hard times at the end of his career, he at least was by all accounts a charismatic orator, competent general, and left the world some marvelous ruins that still stand today. I doubt anyone will be looking at NFL stadiums a thousand years from now.

But the general point holds: when you’re at the height of your power, always remember that there’s nowhere to go but down. Or, in the words of another legendary statesman, Abraham Lincoln:

“It is said an Eastern monarch once charged his wise men to invent him a sentence, to be ever in view, and which should be true and appropriate in all times and situations. They presented him the words: ‘And this, too, shall pass away.'”