The Dallas Cowboys may have come away with a much-needed win against the Miami Dolphins in Week 11 to snap a seven-game skid, but one element from all those losses remained for America’s Team: Jason Garrett didn’t look like the head coach of a 12-4 football team.

No matter how excited you are about Tony Romo’s return and this win for a frustrated franchise and fan base, you can’t argue Garrett made some boneheaded decisions this week.

Let’s start five days before the Miami game when Garrett made the interesting decision to cut Christine Michael and Corey White, reportedly for not showing up in proper attire for the team’s plane ride to Tampa Bay. Garrett requires all players to wear suits on those trips and White told TMZ he was indeed cut because a dress shirt and slacks didn’t cut it.

Are you kidding me?

Let’s get one thing straight: Every football coach needs to lay down the law with his team, but you can’t shoot yourself in the foot unnecessarily. White broke the rules, as he admitted to TMZ, but is that a reason to cut a player who has been a huge surprise asset for this injury-riddled squad?

If you answered yes to that question, just exit out of this window now.

The correct answer is absolutely not! If a player like White, who isn’t untouchable but is very important to the team’s success right now, especially with Orlando Scandrick on IR and Morris Claiborne hobbled, does something petty like that, run him until he pukes. Or make him do bear crawls around the stadium. Or something else – anything else – that is unpleasant and humiliating, but keeps him on the roster. That more than makes an example of him, but it also makes him at least as valuable to your team moving forward than he’s ever been, if not more.

The seven-game losing streak isn’t a factor here. Even after that long ride back from Tampa, you know Romo is coming back and you know White has been huge for your defense when you weren’t expecting him to be. There’s just no good reason for cutting him, especially if it was just out of frustration on Garrett’s part.

I mean, that’s not exactly mentally tough for a guy with a Princeton education.

And the same goes for Michael; the only reason nobody is mentioning his release is because Robert Turbin set the woods on fire in his Dallas debut and Michael wasn’t playing much anyway. But remember: the Cowboys gave up a draft pick to get Michael and gave up on him half a season later. Again, it’s hard to justify this move as mentally tough.

And we won’t even go into the whole thing with the Cowboys not only having Greg Hardy on the roster but also defending him and his behavior multiple times…and then cutting Michael and White for not wearing a jacket and tie with their dress clothes.

So after all that, we’re just now getting to the Xs and Os blunders by Garrett in the latest game of the season. Yes, I’m aware it was a win, but we’re talking about a team that really can’t afford to lose another game to get into the playoffs.

Cowboys fans had to be happy going into halftime with a 14-point lead against Miami following Romo’s bomb of a touchdown pass to Terrance Williams. But then that pretty safe bet went down the drain when Dallas squib kicked the kickoff – and quite poorly, I might add – which resulted in Miami getting the ball at its own 46 with 1:02 to play and quickly scoring to cut the lead to seven.

Now here we have to point out the unsportsmanlike penalty on Williams and Dez Bryant after the former’s first touchdown catch since Week 4 that moved the kickoff back 15 yards to begin with, but that should have been even more reason for the Cowboys to simply kick the ball deep. If Rich Bissacia made the call to squib it, Garrett has to overrule it. If Garrett made it himself, it’s hard to be surprised by that at this point.

So that resulted in the Dallas defense finally giving up a touchdown after stifling Miami’s offense throughout the first half, but then all seemed well late in the fourth quarter when the Cowboys had a 10-point lead and the ball in Dolphins territory. The four-minute drill was working to perfection until Garrett’s troops were faced with a fourth-and-11 from Miami’s 46-yard line.

Then Dallas made the brilliant decision to just run Darren McFadden again around the right end and essentially hand Miami the ball with 1:09 to play. Sure, it was a steep hill to climb for the Dolphins’ offense at that point, but why make it easy on them again?

It would have been a 53-yard field goal for Dan Bailey to make it a three-possession game and ice it. But instead either Scott Linehan lost his marbles for a split second (he called a fantastic game otherwise) and Garrett just decided to ignore it, or “Red J” made yet another unnecessary moronic move that also could have backfired.

After last year’s surprising, dominant 12-4 campaign, we all thought Garrett actually developed into a solid head coach without play-calling duties to overwhelm him, especially with the three first-round offensive line picks that resulted in a unit that rivaled the one from the Cowboys’ superior 1990s teams. And while the solid roster building and better-late-than-never commitment to the running game made everything gravy for a while, we’re now seeing that Garrett still has a ways to go as an NFL coach.

Does that mean the Cowboys need a new skipper? No, regardless of what Randy Galloway thinks, especially considering Garrett has done this well under Jerry Jones, which is basically the sports version of Mission: Impossible. But based off the evidence stacked against him over the past six days, it would be foolish to just assume Dallas is in good hands in the head coaching department with Garrett at the helm come playoff time.

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