Dave Hyde: Starting Sunday, next four games will tell if Dolphins are ready for next step

The Dolphins play a struggling Jets team before finishing the regular season with a three-game gauntlet of winning teams. It's not just the season that will be decided.

The next four games are the most important for the Miami Dolphins of this millennium. No discussion. No debate. No other nominations, like any of their five playoff games, four of which were losses in seasons where just making the playoffs was the prize.

This is it.

This stretch.

Jets. Dallas. At Baltimore. Buffalo.

This franchise sacrificed most of four seasons to reach this exact window of opportunity to win big this season. And here they are at 9-4. Closing in on the AFC East title. Tracking the home-field playoff advantage.

The AFC is wide open with no great team, too, meaning the biggest prize shimmers before them, just as they talked when tanking seasons and trading players and accumulating draft picks all the way through this season.

“We feel that the city of Miami has been waiting, and they’re ready for a championship,” quarterback Tua Tagovailoa said back in September.

It was going so la-di-da well, too, until the last five minutes of Monday’s loss to Tennessee, too. Enter: Drama. Fans were despondent. Some wanted to cover the bandwagon in black crepe paper for the week. Others feared a foreshadowing of the kind of December doom of the past two decades.

That’s why this Jets game gets moved into the Final Four of important games. The other three — Dallas, Baltimore and Buffalo — are obvious picks. They all have winning records and the Dolphins have beaten just one winning team since September of last season.

That one win is telling, too. It’s Denver. The team the Dolphins hung 70 points on in September is 7-6 heading into their Saturday night game. That shows how seasons aren’t static, how teams change from month to month across the schedule for better or worse.

Denver went 1-4 and allowed 36.2 points its first five weeks. It’s gone 6-2 (beating the likes of Buffalo and Kansas City) and allowed 16 points in the past eight weeks.

Have the Dolphins changed? And how? Their defense is decidedly better, even if those last minutes against Tennessee will argue that idea. Their offense is decidedly hurt in the way many teams are this time of year, too, from the offensive line to the engine of Tyreek Hill.

The looming contract decision of Tagovailoa gets decided here. This offense needs his play to elevate those around him, to carry them at times, especially if Hill’s ankle slows him.

The next three games are against top 5 defenses, too, meaning McDaniel’s head-coaching bona fides get decided here, too. He’s a fun spirit and a creative mind. But many will only see him as fun and creative if the Dolphins set aside the Tennessee loss and keep winning.

“What I’ve seen thus far is guys focus that frustration into the game plan and preparation for this opponent,’’ McDaniel said on Friday of this past week’s mindset. “I think on the surface, you’re generally kind of worried about that. For me, this team this week, I’m not.

“Because like I said, they’re eager to go make some things right. And it’d be one thing if we spent that game — watching the film, there were things that were to our standard. So we’ve been focusing on how did the backend of the game unfold. Once we did that, we moved past and it’s been J-E-T-S all week.”

The Jets are a 5-8 team that’s done the opposite of Denver. They’ve lost five of their past six games, including 34-13 to the Dolphins three weeks ago. This would be considered a similar walkover if the Jets didn’t have a big second half to beat Houston last week and the Dolphins didn’t collapse against Tennessee.

Now it’s a momentum play for the Dolphins. They need to regain some confidence Sunday before starting season-ending gauntlet against tough teams. This isn’t just a season-defining stretch for this team.

It’s sets the table for a franchise-defining playoffs. The Dolphins sacrificed wins and plotted draft picks for four years for this window in the fifth year. And here we are. The next four games are the most important of this millennium.