For college football coaches, the Year 2 bump is real. Maryland hopes to make that leap.

Last season — with a fresh staff, different schemes and a revamped culture — ended with only three wins, albeit in one of college football’s most difficult divisions. The 2019 campaign served as the first year in a rebuilding project, especially given the turbulent months that predated Locksley.

But now, even with an upcoming season that will feature dozens of newcomers, a different quarterback and possible chaos prompted by playing amid a pandemic, there is continuity. The offensive and defensive systems may have evolved, but they’re rooted in last year’s schemes and led by the same coordinators. The coaching staff remained mostly constant. The expectations within the program are not a surprise. And that matters.

“They trust us in a different type of way, and we trust them,” junior wide receiver Brian Cobbs said. “Going into Year 2, as an overall team, I definitely feel like it’s just a looser sense of what we need to do. We’re getting the job done, but nobody’s uptight and nobody’s playing like robots.”

New coaches often refer to their first season as Year 0, indicating that it’s too early to see the fruits of their work. It’s common for programs to fail to produce an uptick in wins during the first season after a coaching change, and many teams regress. Typically, on-field improvement arrives in the second season.

In the past decade of coaching changes at the Power Five level, nearly 40 percent of football programs improved their record by at least two wins from Year 1 to Year 2. Only 14 percent of coaches led their teams to two fewer wins or worse. On average, these Power Five new hires win 6.2 games in Year 1, with a jump to 7.0 wins in Year 2. Those who have made it to their third year, which skews the sample in favor of successful coaches, average 7.3 wins that season.

Locksley joked that maybe his second year at Maryland should be called Year 0.5 because his team is still exceptionally young and the novel coronavirus pandemic kept the team from holding spring practices. These circumstances seem likely to hinder newer coaches — certainly those in their first season but perhaps also those such as Locksley who are still in the early years of building a program.

But even though Maryland will start a new quarterback this season, both players competing for the job — Taulia Tagovailoa and Lance LeGendre — were recruited by Locksley. The team is indeed young. Freshmen and sophomores account for nearly two-thirds of the scholarship players. Only seven scholarship seniors are set to play in 2020. With a large freshman class and an influx of transfers, the program welcomed more than 50 players to the roster. The staff must teach and the players must soak up a new system, but in exchange, Locksley has a roster that is very much his.

“When you come in, it’s a whole new regime, a whole new culture, a whole new standard for how you want to operate and run your program,” Locksley said. “Typically the first year, it’s just implementing it. And then typically what you see is Year 2, everybody acclimatizes to it, and it’s less implementation and more explaining why it’s being done that way.”

Some of Locksley’s coaching peers hired during the same offseason have already begun their 2020 seasons well. Chris Klieman leads No. 20 Kansas State (3-1) and beat Oklahoma on the road. Manny Diaz’s team at Miami is 4-1 and ranked No. 11, with its only loss coming at No. 1 Clemson.

More than a decade ago, Auburn hired Gene Chizik to take the reins of the program, and his tenure there began with an 8-5 season in 2009. But he felt as though just a few plays separated the team from a better record, and an overtime win in the Outback Bowl sparked confidence. That season, Chizik said, “I saw flashes of the program heading in the right direction, and I knew we had the lion’s share of our kids coming back the following year.” Then, in 2010, quarterback Cam Newton won the Heisman Trophy and led Auburn to the national title.

First-year coaches must teach players schemes and terminology while also building communication, trust and the player-coach relationships that are needed to succeed as a program. It’s imperative to get the older players, ones who are respected in the locker room, on board with the new staff, Chizik said, because there’s not time to wait years for the roster to be filled with your recruits.

“As soon you say ‘I do’ to that job and you get married to the AD and the president, the hourglass is turned over and the clock’s ticking,” said Chizik, now an analyst for ESPN and SEC Network. “So if you don’t get the outcome you want in Year 1, then the expectation now, because of money, because of a lot of different things, is that you show a glaring improvement from Year 1 to Year 2.”

About 15 percent of coaches hired at Power Five schools since 2009 reached 10 wins during their first season. Another 9 percent hit double-digit wins by Year 2. But the majority of new hires have not done so.

Coaches arrive at programs that are in various states. Sometimes they’re replacing a coach whose team played well, so he left for a better job. Or they’re filling a vacancy after the school fired an underperforming coach. When only considering programs that won fewer than six games the season before they hired a new coach, the jump from Year 1 to Year 2 is particularly pronounced. In those circumstances since 2009, new coaches average 4.7 wins in Year 1 and 6.0 wins in Year 2.

Maryland hired Locksley after the Terps finished 5-7 in 2018, and the program had recently dealt with the fallout from the preventable death of offensive lineman Jordan McNair, who suffered exertional heatstroke during a team workout. Maryland reinstated coach DJ Durkin, then fired him a day later, during the season. Recruiting efforts had essentially paused for months. A number of position groups had cycled through coaches during their college careers and did so again when Locksley arrived.

But now instead of change, there’s consistency. For most of these players, they chose Locksley and Locksley chose them. He said there’s typically “less resistance” from players by the time coaches reach that second year. That’s why programs improve.

“And then [Years] 3, 4,” Locksley said, “and hopefully 10 to 20 for me, will just be a matter of continuing to bring in the right kind of people.”