This is not a list. Promise. We did that already, and you can find it here. Rather, this is a brief meditation on the year that was — an evolution of thought, as it were.

Our lasting impression of 2014 is that it was the year in which our view of the NFL changed, likely forever. The scandals that rocked the league were sad enough; the way the league handled them with the three O's — obstruction, obfuscation and, finally when backed into a corner, outrage — was something entirely different.

We estimate that outside of watching the Vikings — part of our job, still enjoyable in a vacuum — we've watched about four full quarters of any other NFL game this season. And we haven't really missed it. The action itself has become less about athletes and more about X's and O's (and penalties) than at any point we can ever recall. Even when the action is good, the undercurrent of ugliness remains.

It's important to note, though, that our moral outrage is primarily directed not at the actions but at the reactions. The Ray Rice video, for example, is heartbreaking and despicable, but it's not any worse because he's a football player. Athletes are human beings, and human beings are capable of terrible things (just as they are capable of wonderful things), particularly in the heat of the moment.

People are always going to do bad things. The reckoning is when we find out about character. That's when the powers that be have hours, days, even months to decide what version of the story they are going to try to sell the public. Transparency is easy to see; anything less takes a more discerning eye.

This stage is where we believe the NFL across the board failed that test this year. That will be the lasting impression we have from 2014 in sports: not that athletes behave badly, but that we don't trust the most powerful sports league in the country.