Tom Crean is back to two cups of coffee per day.

That's about the only change he says he's made to stay upbeat during a rough first half of Georgia's SEC schedule. As the Bulldogs have limped to a 1-7 conference start, Crean is trying to keep spirits high as Georgia hopes to figure things out on the court.

"The bottom line is that they can see right through me if I don’t believe we can win," Crean said. "I don’t have any doubt we can. Every day that we go in there, that’s the plan and that’s the process. Then we’ve just got to carry it out in the games and find ways not to beat ourselves."

Georgia has struggled all year to put two halves of basketball together. The Bulldogs either come out flat, as they did in their most recent loss to Vanderbilt, or they falter in the second half as they've done multiple times this year.

Crean chalks up part of that to wavering confidence stemming from offensive struggles. There's also the difficulty of developing a leadership on a team full of new faces that also lost two veterans to injury.

"When you take two seniors out like we had early with PJ (Horne) and like we had in the season with Jailyn (Ingram), you take away two guys that have been in the been there, done that mode," Crean said. "So you’ve got a lot of guys that haven’t had that. But we have had a lot of games now and we’ve got to believe that we can overcome things."

There's a "compounding interest" factor that has hit the Bulldogs when things start to snowball. The offense struggles, then the defense suffers as a result.

That's when leaders generally have to step up, but that hasn't been happening consistently for Georgia.

"That’s the defining characteristic of leadership for a team," Crean said. "You have to be able to do that when the game is not going well for you, or when the game is in peril, and you’re not playing as well and you’re down. You’ve got to continue to drive and inspire your teammates. When guys have been together for years or a couple of years, it’s a little bit easier in that sense, but never totally easy."

The leadership burden doesn't fall on just one player. It has to be a collective effort in order to be effective.

Still, veterans like forward Braelen Bridges are trying to do their part to step up.

"I’m a pretty laid-back guy, but I’m trying to bring that leadership out of me and take a big step forward in that standpoint," Bridges said. "Just taking a step forward and being a leader and just helping my teammates so we can come together and get more wins."

Georgia returns to action when it hosts Arkansas on Wednesday night. It will be the first home game for the Bulldogs since they upset Alabama last week.

That's an experience the team hopes to build on with a home-heavy schedule coming up.