The whispers are about to become screams.

It feels like five minutes ago Josh McCown was being deified for his renaissance and its profound effect on the Jets’ surprising seasonof moderate success and competitiveness.

Two games ago, McCown helped elevate the Jets to relevance in the AFC playoff conversation after a Thursday night dismantling of the Bills.

With a refreshing, renewed optimism surrounding them, the Jets took a 4-5 record to Tampa to play the struggling Buccaneers last Sunday with a chance to match their 2016 win total with six games still remaining.

But after a lackluster 15-10 loss leading into this week’s bye, the McCown narrative quickly has changed — despite the fact he was hit 14 times and sacked six times by a Tampa Bay defense that entered the game with eight sacks all season.

Now, with the Jets 4-6 and a Seabiscuit longshot to make the playoffs, it feels like everyone wants to sit McCown in favor of the young backup quarterbacks, Christian Hackenberg and Bryce Petty.

That isn’t fair and shouldn’t happen for a number of reasons, beginning with the fact the Jets have shown every indication they know all they need to know about the two youngsters and don’t view either as their future franchise quarterback.

Without McCown, this Jets team would be exactly what we thought it would be before the season began — possibly historically bad.

Without McCown, some of the young talent that has emerged this season might not have emerged.

Without McCown, the Jets would have been irrelevant and unwatchable these past two-plus months.

So never mind the calls for Hackenberg and Petty. No disrespect intended to either of them, but McCown deserves to play this season out — barring a dramatic drop in the quality of his play.

He has earned that right with his performance on the field — he’s having the best season of his checkered 13-year career.

And he has earned that right with his selflessness off the field — he has been an ultimate team player, the glue to the locker room one year removed from the polarizing Ryan Fitzpatrick, perceived as me-first selfish by team insiders.

Since the day McCown was signed as a free agent in the offseason — making the Jets the eighth team he has played for and the 10th team he has been a member of in his 13 seasons — he has been as much about helping the team this season as he has been about paying it forward.

His influence in helping the Jets be better after he leaves has been as important to McCown as helping them win as many games as possible this season.

“When you talk about life and legacy, the most important thing you can do in life is to make a place better than when you left it, helping people’s journey along the way,” McCown told The Post in a recent interview. “So if I can be a part of that, that’s what I want to do. There’s nothing more important than that for me. Whenever my time’s done playing — whether it’s this year or next year or whenever — you want to look at a place and say, ‘Man, it’s better and maybe I was a small part in helping make it better.’

“That’s my focus every day when I come to work, and it makes it special to be a part of this.”

That’s not double-talk. It’s genuine. It’s why McCown is so respected in the Jets locker room and upstairs in the offices of management. It’s why the Browns tried to talk him into staying with their organization as a coach after last season.

But McCown still had the bug to play, and so he has this season, playing better than he ever has.

His 69 percent completion rate, which ranks third among starting quarterbacks this season, is the highest of his career. He has thrown a career-high 14 touchdowns to eight interceptions, the third-best touchdown-to-interception ratio of his career. His 93.7 rating is 13th in the NFL this season and the second-highest of his career, behind only 2013, when he started five games with the Bears.

McCown came to the Jets as a veteran-insurance afterthought, a quarterback with a 2-20 won-loss record in his previous three seasons. But he has become so much more.

That’s why he deserves more — six more games to this 2017 season to be exact.