“Year 2” was a common offseason theme. Kirby Smart was entering his second year as head coach. Jacob Eason was entering his second season as the starting quarterback (get well soon!) It was natural that we saw countless “Year 2 effect” stories pointing out how well a coach or quarterback did in his second season relative to his first.

With Smart, it was exciting to think about how Mark Richt took an 8-4 team in 2001 and produced an SEC champion the next year. Smart’s association with Alabama and Nick Saban reminded us that Saban’s 7-6 squad in 2007 improved enough to post an undefeated regular season in 2008. Eason can’t seem to escape Matthew Stafford comparisons, and so we looked to 2007 and Stafford’s second season as the starting quarterback for what we might expect of Eason after one year leading the offense.

Within a single season, the second game gets similar treatment. The claim that “teams usually make their biggest improvement between the first and second games” has been repeated enough that we accept it as a fact and an inevitability.

The second game hasn’t always been so kind to Georgia. We only have to go back a season. We felt good about overcoming a decent North Carolina team, got giddy over Nick Chubb’s return, and saw the promise of a talented freshman quarterback. Then came the horror of the Nicholls game. Since we brought up 2007, remember how it began. Georgia had an impressive win over Oklahoma State in the opener, and Stafford was productive and efficient leading the team to a comfortable win. That was followed up by an ugly 16-12 loss to South Carolina – a game in which the offense failed to reach the end zone for the first time in six years. That loss ended up keeping Georgia from a shot at SEC and national titles in 2007.

Surely Saban had it easier? The second game of his turnaround 2008 season was an unconvincing 20-6 win over Tulane that featured only one offensive touchdown. The Tide had a dominant eye-opening win over Clemson in the Georgia Dome to start the season, but even this team that would head into the postseason without a loss couldn’t avoid a Game 2 hangover.

Georgia enters Game 2 of 2017 focused as much on survival as improvement. We hope the offensive line takes a step forward with Solomon Kindley’s return. The many true freshmen who played in the opener should also be past their first game jitters and can iron out some of Saturday’s mistakes. The team’s biggest priority though is preparing Jake Fromm for his first start. It’s tough to expect wholesale improvement as the team has had less than a week to prepare for Notre Dame while scrambling to get Fromm and his backups as much work as possible. Since Fromm looked comfortable and confident in the opener, I’d expect that he’s faced everything but the kitchen sink this week in an attempt to rattle him and see how he responds.

We’ve seen some impressive season openers before, but it’s not often that Georgia has faced a Game 2 of this magnitude. You have the novelty of the Notre Dame trip, a road game as the underdog, the challenge of a Top 25 opponent, and you’re placing the offense in the hands of a true freshman. That would be enough for an entire offseason of preparation; now you’re doing it within the normal parameters of just another game week. If Georgia is able to sustain the level of play from the opener while showing improvement in light of the major shock to the system of losing Eason, this Game 2 could open up some big possibilities for the rest of Year 2.