At 4-8, the Jets are all but certain to miss out on the playoffs.
It's been a strange season for Gang Green, starting with a Week 1 loss to Buffalo that easily could have been a win, followed by Sam Darnold missing three games with mono. And just as it looked like the season was on the verge of a complete collapse at 1-7, the Jets won three straight to get to 4-7.
Then, unexpectedly, the Jets were defeated by the previously winless Bengals.
Now, the Jets will look to finish out the final quarter of their regular season schedule, and, at the very least, build momentum heading into 2020.
"I don't know the answer to that. I've seen teams do it," Adam Gase said when asked about taking momentum into the following season. "I think Carolina showed a good example of that the year before they went to the Super Bowl where they really got on a great run there at the end of that one season and they carried it over to the next season.
"But there are so many moving parts a lot of times that it doesn't always. But if your core group of guys that are doing things right and they feel like this is how we do things going into next season, then they know this is how we do it and the new guys coming in, they are leading the charge on that. When that happens, that's a positive thing because it's less learning and it's more, 'Hey we've repped this, we've done this before, we know how to do it, we know the process, we know how we need to do it to have success.'"
The Jets head coach also doesn't want to look ahead too far into next season, with four regular season games still remaining, starting with Sunday's home game against the Miami Dolphins, who knocked off the Eagles last week.
"You always just want to take it one week at a time and really we have plenty of challenges coming up here in the next month.," Gase said on Wednesday. "Obviously we have a chance to play a home game against a division team, we lost to them last time, so we have a chance to go play these guys again at our stadium and put a good game together."
The Dolphins earned their third win of the season in Miami this past Sunday, putting up 37 points against the Eagles. Former Jets QB Ryan Fitzpatrick threw for a season-high 365 yards and three touchdowns.
Gase knows that the veteran can still make opposing defenses pay for any mistakes, as Fitzpatrick threw for 288 yards and three TDs in Miami's win over the Jets earlier this season.
"They are throwing the ball, which I'm sure (Fitzpatrick) loves. He had a good game last week," Gase said. "The last we played him, we struggled to get him to turn the ball over, create enough pressure to make him uncomfortable, so that's the number one thing when we you are playing Fitzy, you just have to get to him, you have to try to get him to make some mistakes and put pressure on him and make some of those throws tough."