Sophomore years can go one of two ways for a football player, especially a quarterback.

He can either take a big jump forward and propel his game and his team's offense to the next level or can fall into the cliched sophomore slump and struggle to get back to the numbers he put up as a freshman.

The biggest question for Ryan Hilinski is which camp he falls into after finishing last year completing 58.1 percent of his passes, averaging 5.8 yards per attempt and notching a quarterback efficiency rating of 113.4.

In an effort to try and gauge how he'll do this year, GamecockCentral took a look back at a few notable freshmen who played as freshmen and how they did the next year.

For the purpose of this, the stats that will get looked at are per game and per attempt, primarily yards per attempt, completion percentage and efficiency rating.

The most recent one is the guy Hilinski replaced in Jake Bentley, who started seven games as a freshman—7.5 yards per attempt, 65.8 completion percentage and a efficiency rating of 140—but his sophomore there was a little bit of a slump.

Bentley threw for more yards (1,374) , touchdowns (9) and interceptions (8) but that was to be expected since he played in six more games. What did go down were his yards per attempt (down to 7.1), completion percentage to 62.2 percent and his efficiency rating went down by almost 10 to 130.7.

The good news in the case of Bentley was he did have a career year as a junior with a 61.9 completion percentage but career highs in yards per attempt at 8.2 and a 146.3 efficiency rating.

While Stephen Garcia wasn't a true freshman when he started, he did play eight games his redshirt freshman year before taking over as the full-time starter in 2009.

In 2009 he saw a slight increase in his completion percentage, up two points to 55.3 percent, a slight dip in yards per attempt (6.8 to 6.6 yards) and he was more efficient, going from a 113.7 rating in 2008 to 119.3 the following year.

Phil Petty also started as a freshman, completing 49.1 percent of passes, averaging 5.7 yards per attempt with a quarterback rating of 109 and dipped for the most part as a sophomore.

He completed his passes at a lower percentage, just 44.5, averaged just 5.5 yards per attempt and had an efficiency rating of 83.4. All of those numbers, though, did increase substantially as a junior.

Steve Taneyhill started as a freshman as well, completing 53.1 percent of his 162 attempts, averaging 7.9 yards per attempt with a 125.9 efficiency rating.

As a sophomore in 1993 Taneyhill's production dropped and he completed just 51.2 percent of his passes, averaged 6.6 yards per attempt with an efficiency rating over 20 points lower than his freshman year (104.1).

Like all the others, though, he'd string together a really good junior year: 62.9 completion percentage, 6.2 yards per attempt, but his efficiency jumped to 127.4 .

Why the dip?

It likely means defenses understand the starting quarterback's weakness a little more and develop a game plan tailored to exposing that, which contributes to a downtick more often than not in year two.

For Hilinski, it'll be up to him to try and figure out ways to close the holes in his game enough to avoid a sophomore slump all together or, if there is one, make it a marginal dip.

Getting back to full health after an offseason knee procedure should help his case as a sophomore.