Atlanta Falcons superstar Michael Vick is in trouble for allegedly being involved in a dog-fighting ring, which is cruel and awful, but not unlike Vick’s own job. What is football if not dog fighting with more money and prettier cheerleaders? Bloody entertainment. So it makes sense that football’s violence would spend too much time spilling out of the huddles and into headlines and handcuffs.

You take the scent of a dog fight home with you, in the fabric of what you are. And a beast as big and angry as football does not tame well, sometimes snapping the leash straining against all the tensions in its huge and muscled neck.

The NFL has seen 283 players arrested or charged with crimes since 2000, according to the attorneys for suspended Tennessee cornerback Pac-Man Jones. That doesn’t even count periphery ugliness like Vick’s most recent shame, but it is nonetheless an amazing number. If you arrested the entire 40-man Florida Marlins roster (starters, subs, minor-leaguers and guys on the disabled list) for each of the last seven years, you’d almost arrive at it.

New football commissioner Roger Goodell is kicking in the saloon doors with tough-guy posturing by suspending Jones for a year, but he’s like a man with a single moist towelette busting in and proclaiming he’s going to clean up the entire slaughterhouse.

America’s most popular game is a savage spectacle, and the same things that make players good at it (recklessness, violence, a disregard for consequences) are what often make them bad elsewhere. Yes, you can find good guys in football. And you can find good girls in strip clubs. But the corrupted workplaces make it very hard. It takes a certain amount of crazy to make your living the way gladiators do.

Have you seen the Internet fury of a Miami Liberty City man known as Kimbo? He is a huge bare-knuckle fighter, bearded and bald and shirtless, who has been knocking fools out in street fights on shaky video cameras and developing a mythical following with his quiet rage. A lot of rabid football players have some Kimbo in them. And we cheer that part of them when we aren’t disgusted by it.

Dolphin Jason Taylor becomes such a raging lunatic on Sundays that he has broken things in the locker room and thrown scalding coffee. Teammates stay away from him and have dubbed him Anger Man. And that’s before games. Taylor, one of the good guys, has the discipline to channel and manage that kind of aggression.

But many of his peers don’t.

Throw in the booze and drugs and pain-killers that football players use to self-medicate the daily wounds of the workplace – pain that makes them limp through retirement and, on average, die earlier than the rest of us – and you can already hear the police sirens in the distance.

Bill Belichick and Bill Parcells rode that untamed beast, and all the rest of Lawrence Taylor’s demons, to fame and riches while yammering about the need for character and discipline.

Goodell has a public-relations problem, so the stance he is taking on Pac-Man Jones is easy, not tough. It makes him look good for trying, even if his suspension of Jones falls apart in federal court because he is trampling due process with punishments that haven’t been collectively bargained. No matter how unsympathetic a victim he is, Jones has a contract, unlike most of us who can be fired for embarrassing our companies.