It would be nice to live in a world where news of a double vehicle homicide by a player for the Dallas Cowboys was a surprise. Sadly, if such a world exists, it’s nowhere near here.

This latest Cowboy scandal, wherein cornerback Dwayne Goodrich struck and killed two men while rushing home from a topless club, is perhaps less egregious than previous Cowboy brushes with the law – if only because Goodrich has shown the good sense and character necessary to confess to his crime. Given the team’s history of drawn out legal dramas involving guns in airports, drug abuse and rape charges, hearing a Cowboy player fess up to his wrongs so quickly and willingly strikes an unfamiliar, yet admirable, chord.

But at the same time this all simply brings back to the surface the continued quagmire posed by the Dallas Cowboys. Though the organization was instrumental, decades ago, in helping Dallas move beyond the spectre of the Kennedy assassination, it has become a local embarrasment in recent years. The old joke that Cowboys players won’t be able to have huddles on the field because it would violate their parole to associate with known felons today sounds less sarcastic and more than a little prophetic.

What was once ‘America’s Team’ has now become Dallas’ bane. The Cowboys organization and its employees saunter around Big D with a swagger earned by those who came before, and not deserved by the current leadership at Valley Ranch. Like any group suffering from perpetual ethical rot, one has to look to the top to see what sort of leadership has led the Cowboys to this pathetic state of affairs. The leadership of Jerry Jones has created a moral vacuum atop the Valley Ranch organizational chart, and his vacuous nature has seeped into the character of the team he owns.

For the city of Dallas to be synonymous with the Cowboys is to be synonymous with scandal, crime and – perhaps most damning to football fans – losing seasons. Perhaps Dallas should sue for divorce from this dismal team, before Jerry Jones does more harm to this city’s reputation than Lee Harvey Oswald ever could.