Time can work two ways.

It can expose bad habits, and bring deficiencies to light. Or it can offer opportunity to refine positive tendencies, and make good things even better.

For the UL football team’s two coordinators, Greg Stewart on defense and Jay Johnson on offense, it’s been all about the latter heading into tonight’s opening game of their second season with the Ragin’ Cajuns.

"The No. 1 thing is we’ve been in the system for a year," Stewart said. "They (Cajun players) know the calls, they know the adjustments off the calls.

"Last year, if somebody showed us something different we’d have to make the adjustments a lot on the sideline. Now, they pretty much can do it on their own, in their heads. That puts us further ahead of what we were."

On offense, Johnson said the Cajuns are "definitely strides ahead of where we were last year."

He does temper that by saying there will be "growing pains" before UL gets to where it was when it finished 2011 with a New Orleans Bowl win over San Diego State.

Yet after spending the past month preparing to face Southland Conference-member Lamar tonight and for the season ahead, he senses they’ll be capable of much more as 2012 unfolds.

"It’s been a compilation of knowing our personnel a whole heckuva lot better," Johnson said this week.

"Having been through a season with us as a staff, having been through (two springs), having been (two summers), having been through another fall camp — you add all those up.

"As a staff, our schemes and all that have started to fit together a little bit for us — which obviously is going to help it fit together for the players, which hopefully can raise our level of execution and raise our level of consistency."

Rather than expect the Cajuns to pile layer upon layer of a Blaine Gautier- and Javone Lawson-led base that produced and average of 394.6 yards per game in 2011, however, Johnson suggested much the opposite is true.

After one year, UL coaches were able to strip down all of what was in to just what the Cajuns did best — then build upon that.

The key, he said, has been "learning our personnel and trying to see what fits for both the run and the pass."

"That’s something of a balancing act, because sometimes simpler is better," said Johnson, who lost just two starters, tight end Ladarius Green and guard Kyle Plouhar, from his 2011 offense. "We were trying to find ourselves and we had a lot of different things going (last year).

"So now we’ve really tried to hone, and see where we’re at. So, it is a combination of both. I think we have more flexibility in what we do, but I don’t know that we’ve really added any schematics."

Defensively, schemes remain largely the same.

But it’s what the Cajuns can now do within them that is different, and perhaps will be what helps them lower the 29.8 points per game they yielded a seaso ago.

At times, in fact, UL may look more 3-4 than the hybrid 4-3 it claims to be.

And that’s not so much a product as time as differing personnel, with the addition of essentially four key newcomers — outside linebacker Delvin Jones and starting safety Tig Barksdale, both former Ole Miss signees; outside linebacker Domique Tovell, who redshirted in 2011; and starting safety Rodney Gillis, a fifth-year senior who played sparingly last year — to a upgraded unit that is replacing seven starters.

"That’s got to do more so with people than with scheme — because we’ve got a 240-pound guy (Jones) playing outside linebacker, where last year we had a 190-pounder," Stewart said, suggesting that 240-pounder can rush off the edge when need be like no Cajun linebacker last year could.

That in mind, what Stewart wants to take out of tonight is a sense that his top contributors this year will be willing to play as hard as last year’s seniors did.

"They just played relentlessly, and that’s what we want to see," he said.

Johnson, meanwhile, will be looking for sound execution and a quiet night when it comes to turnovers.

"The first thing we have to do," he said, "is take care of the football."