Georgia State coach Trent Miles knows what the trajectory of a reclamation project is supposed to look like.
At Indiana State, his alma mater, it took two years of brutally consistent losing before a winning culture took hold. And at Georgia State, a start-up program whose transition to the Football Bowl Subdivision was starting to look a bit hopeless, Miles faced a similar time frame and initial results.
The difference was that midway through his third season, with the Panthers stuck at 2-6, it was unclear from the outside whether the same kind of progress was happening.