As Georgia reaches the midway point of the season with the traditional bye week ahead of the Cocktail Party, the Bulldogs are caught looking for a balance. They want to enjoy what they’ve done to gain a No. 1 ranking but also keep their eyes on the SEC and national championship aspirations.

“It depends on how you look at accomplishment,” QB Stetson Bennett said after the Kentucky win. “We’re proud of what we’ve done. I mean it’d be silly not to be. We’ve played good football, but it doesn’t mean we don’t have each and every opportunity to get better, at each and every position. Focus going into this week, I’m sure it’ll get healthy. Get better at your individual assignment”

Georgia coaches have no doubt impressed upon the players that this strong start can slip away in Jacksonville against a suddenly wounded but still dangerous Florida team, or at high-flying Tennessee and what could easily be a hostile environment.

There are land mines ahead, just like there have been so far, such as to open the season against Clemson when plenty of national pundits had that as nothing more than a toss-up game, and certainly few, if any, had a dominant Georgia victory (even if the scoreboard registered it as only a 7-point margin). Then there were the dangerous games, at least leading up to them, against Arkansas, and at Auburn, easily the most hostile environment the Bulldogs have played in this season.

When he recapped the Kentucky game, coach Kirby Smart talked about how the team recovered from Kentucky’s late first-half drive, and got back on track in the second half. But his comments could have easily been a reaction to how the first half of the season has gone. There will be white-knuckle drives and games ahead, and Smart knows it.

“I’m never satisfied. I hate to say it, I hate that word, but I’m not satisfied,” Smart said. “I’m pleased with the effort. We’re going to have adversity, guys. You’re not going to play in the SEC without adversity. It’s about how you respond to it, and I didn’t think our guys blinked. Nobody was panicked.”

Smart knows that while Florida, Tennessee, and presumably Alabama, or whoever wins the SEC West, will be especially tough, but the other teams aren’t exactly pushovers.

“Every game is not going to come out and jump all over people,” Smart said. “They’ve got good players, they’ve got good plans. I thought these guys came out and played really hard against us. It was a hard-fought game. We feel like if we can keep choppin’ wood, eventually, we can make more plays than the other team. I just don’t know how long that’s going to take. But we believe that no matter how long it takes, we’ll make those plays.”

Speaking of games against Georgia’s chief rivals, at least this season and in recent years, Bennett’s play also is a microcosm of how Georgia did last year. But Smart is as confident as ever that Bennett can deliver against Florida and, presumably, Alabama. Bennett’s improvement, however you want to characterize it, is similar in a way to the program as a whole.

“Experience, a better defense, he’s grown up some,” Smart said. “I don’t know, y’all tell me because I thought the guy played pretty good last year. He got beat by the national champion with him at quarterback and we didn’t play real good on defense. Then he was playing pretty good against the team that won the SEC East and then he took a shot and hurt his shoulder. I don’t know that this is all a new premonition that he’s just all of a sudden gotten better. I think he’s a very effective quarterback, very bright, he can run with his legs. He understands what (Todd) Monken is trying to do.”

Georgia appears to have all the ingredients of a championship-caliber team, and more importantly, understands the path to the confetti. Once the bye week is over, that march resumes.