At season’s beginning, Cowboys’ owner Jerry Jones waxed rhapsodic and entertained utopian visions of an extravagant and unprecedented homecoming for “America’s Team” at this years’ Super Bowl in Dallas. In hindsight, Jones would sound dramatically less delusional had he been discussing the 0-8 Buffalo Bills.

The ignominy of the Cowboy’s disgraceful midseason record of 1-7 has the football world entranced and confused in dual measure. The wretchedly ugly play of the NFL’s most valuable and recognizable franchise, which has appeared in eight Super Bowls with five victories, would be the equivalent to the New York Yankees (both rich in legacy and perpetually attractive on paper) lurching into the All-Star break at 10-71.

Torrents of questions and criticisms have been kicked up into a blinding dust storm by fans and media alike surrounding where to assign blame—or how swiftly the axe should fall. Well, the axe finally fell, and it do so finally, mercifully on poor, likeable Wade Phillips.

“Enigmatic” represents the most obvious designation the Cowboys’ have earned thus far under Phillips, who received the pink slip Monday after an embarrassing 45-7 primetime loss to the Green Bay Packers. How is one to reconcile the disparity between the Cowboy’s 33-15 record during Phillips’ first three seasons against this year’s horrendous start? Astonishingly, the Cowboys returned 10 of 11 defensive starters from 2009’s 11-5 playoff team—a manic group who allowed 15.6 points-per-game last season, but 29 points-per-game in 2010. The sick wedding of Dallas’ porous defensive—for which Phillips called the plays—to its knack for ill-timed penalties and celebratory theatrics reflects why the Cowboys are chained to their worst start since the Cowboys first season under owner Jerry Jones.

Of course, the 1989 Cowboys were akin to displaced children from a broken home: the team’s legendary hat-donning patriarch, Tom Landry, fizzled out the year before, and new owner Jerry Jones and new head coach Jimmy Johnson took over the franchise. The team, very much in transition then, blundered its way to a 1-15 record with rookie quarterback Troy Aikman under center.

But this year’s Cowboys were supposed to be different. The expectations were high. Instead, the Cowboys have illustrated that any good train wreck must be replete with valuable cargo: the Cowboy legacy, a proud and avid fan base, a pretty-boy quarterback, egomaniacal wide receivers, and a Steinbrennian incarnate—Jerry Jones—catatonically slumped in the owners’ box, and, of course, those lofty aspirations.

Pro Bowl quarterback Tony Romo’s fractured left clavicle sustained against the New York Giants was a mere twist of the knife for an already-hemorrhaging team full of talent but lacking in the win column.

Firing the head coach was standard operating procedure with a team this mired. Indeed, making the change is always the most convenient and most sensible option in lieu of broadly razing coordinators and releasing conspicuous dead weight personnel—which would yield far more upheaval.

But Jones’ rationale for keeping Phillips dangling was largely financial since he contractually owes Phillips money, and was only marginally tethered to his ethos of not changing coaches mid-season. Though the decision violated his code, and will slightly undermine the holy bottom-line, Jones took drastic but necessary action by firing Phillips.

However it happened, it turned out that Phillips’ message and methods were dead on arrival this season: the abundant penalties and lack of discipline chiefly signaled a void in central leadership. Coach Wade certainly does not come complete with a temperament to assert, yell, or intimidate a team this dysfunctional bac to respectability.

Coach Wade’s predecessor, Bill Parcells, was such a coach, but the Cowboys (although with largely different personnel and coming off of several losing seasons) went a stagnant 34-30 under his direction for four seasons. It is safe to assume that even a draconian taskmaster like Parcells couldn’t have significantly curtailed the penalties, brain-lapses and unwarranted bravado out of a team so undisciplined.

Ultimately, whether it is a holding call to nullify a game-winning touchdown in Washington, or crippling excessive celebration penalties in back-to-back close games, or even the general lethargy on display in humiliating losses to Jacksonville and Green Bay, the Cowboys seem to have quit this year, and needed a change.