Clark: Clemson reminds FSU Football how far away it really is

CLEMSON, S.C. -- It doesn't matter how realistic you were before the game.

I don't care how prepared you thought you were for Saturday's showdown with the No. 2 Clemson Tigers. There is no way you were prepared for that.

The defending national champions were up 42-0 in the third quarter. At one point, they were out-gaining the Seminoles by almost 400 yards of total offense. And even though FSU scored a couple of second-half touchdowns, there is nothing respectable about losing 45-14.

Nothing.

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After a bye week, FSU didn't record its third first down Saturday until Clemson already had scored four touchdowns. That's humiliating. It's inexcusable.

That, in a quick synopsis, was what I was thinking while I watched most of the game on Saturday.

Many of you were, too.

Even if you are the most skeptical fan in the world, you couldn't have possibly foreseen a scenario where Trevor Lawrence would be pulled with nine minutes left in the third quarter. That FSU would be out of the game shortly after it began.

Knowing that the Seminoles had two weeks to prepare and that they were riding a two-game winning streak (!), I surely expected a much sharper effort than what we saw on Saturday. Which was, just like last year, an embarrassing blowout loss.

But now it's time to be realistic again.

Florida State is 3-3. Which is the record we all expected the team to have right now after beating N.C. State in its last game.

And while it's fair -- and even encouraged (more on that in a moment) -- to be irate about the way the Seminoles played on Saturday, nothing has really changed about what this season can and can not be.

The only thing that has been hammered home after six weeks of 2019 is that FSU isn't anywhere close -- not even in the same galaxy -- as the Clemson program. The SS Dabo has sailed off past the horizon, not even visible anymore to the naked eye.

What hasn't yet been proven though, what we don't know, is how much FSU has gained on the rest of the conference. That's what the final six weeks will show.

That's what is still left to see.

I know that Florida State fans don't judge their program by how it plays against the Wake Forests and Louisvilles of the world. But right now, in 2019, that's exactly where we are.

It's a shame. And there are a lot of factors to how we got here. Ones that have been written and talked about so much that I'm not going to even bother mentioning them here. But, and it saddens me to write this as a college football fan, FSU's biggest game of this month wasn't ever going to be against Clemson. We knew that was a loss as soon as the schedule came out.