Go back to last month when Florida State was ranked No. 3 in the nation. Even if the Seminoles opened the season with a loss to No. 1 Alabama, the belief was this team was good enough to still challenge for a College Football Playoff spot.
Now move ahead to Saturday.
As Seminoles coach Jimbo Fisher said in his postgame remarks, North Carolina State was always "a play ahead" of the Seminoles in a 27-21 upset in front of 73,541 fans at Doak Campbell Stadium.
Fisher and the Seminoles have lost before. They've lost three games in each of the last two seasons. But this loss was different. FSU is 0-2 for the first time in Fisher's eight seasons and also since the 1989 campaign.
The college playoff system is only three seasons old, yet a two-loss team has never reached the semifinal. At 0-2, what's the next step for Fisher and the Seminoles?
"There is no panic, but there is an urgency," Fisher said. "You have to correct some things and get better. We're going to line up and play next week. Whether we're 1-1 or 0-2, we gotta play one week at a time, one game at a time. That's all that we can control.
"That's what the conversation is about."
A lackluster run game, poor special-teams play, turnovers and the eventual season-ending knee injury to Deondre Francois doomed the Seminoles in a 24-7 loss to the Crimson Tide to open the season.
Then came the two-week layoff due to Hurricane Irma and the storm's aftermath.
N.C. State was going to come with its own set of issues. There was a worry about how well true freshman quarterback James Blackman would perform in his first career start. Blackman was fine. He finished 22 of 38 for 278 yards and a touchdown.
Special teams was rough early yet rebounded with Ricky Aguayo hitting four of his five field-goal attempts and Logan Tyler averaging 47.2 yards per punt. But FSU struggled to get stops on third down, execute when it had the ball on third down and also with penalties.
"We pretty much knew what was coming," junior defensive end Josh Sweat said. "We had the right calls, but we just weren't there."
Through two games, the Seminoles are converting only 29.6 percent of their third-down opportunities on offense. That ranks 115th out of 128 Football Bowl Subdivision teams.
And the penalties have been a growing trend. Ranked 61st in the nation in 2015, the Seminoles were 124th last year and were assessed for an average of 72.9 yards per game. They accrued 11 penalties Saturday for 93 yards.
"We had four critical motion penalties, which, we didn't have any in the loudest stadium in America," Fisher said referring to the game against Alabama at Mercedes-Benz Stadium in Atlanta. "Those motions were critical. We had a critical face mask. We had a critical late hit on third down. ... We had a targeting on a trick play."
Fisher summarized his team's penalties by saying, "in that regard, we gotta get better."
