You can't take the sum total of an entire year, tie it up in a box and slap one label on it. Life is too complicated for such a simple procedure. Something's bound to break or ooze its way out.
So it is for mixed martial arts. It's easy to look at all the downward-sloping trend lines and conclude, as some have, that the sport suffered a bit of a crash in 2014. It might just as easy to point to a handful of great scraps and great stories and conclude, as some have, that this was another wonderful year for MMA and that everything is perfectly wonderful, thank you so very much.
But as Akira Kurosawa showed us lo those years ago, the truth always dwells in the messy middle, where emotion holds no sway and tidy graphics go to die.
That's where we're going to try to exist right now, as we evaluate both the good and the bad in the year that was for MMA.
We can't cover it all, but we can sure provide a panopticonal perspective. Because as faithful readers of this listicolumn (I just made that term up) know, the final stats only reveal so much. Here are the real winners and losers in all of mixed martial arts for 2014.
