NC State football, after embracing hype and expectations, dealt humbling dose of reality

It was in this same city, just a few blocks away from the latest football humbling N.C. State endured here on Saturday night, where Dave Doeren in late July verbalized what many a long-suffering Wolfpack football fan had long wanted to hear him say. What many of them had been saying for a long time, themselves: That good was no longer good enough. That the time was now.

That if the time wasn’t now for N.C. State football, given the investments and the slow-build process to alleged contention; given the admirable evolution in Doeren’s 12 seasons from bad to mediocre to solid to pretty good ... then when would such a time ever come for State to take that long-desired and elusive next step toward becoming something more?

Doeren, for one, accepted the reality. Embraced it, even. He believed it was time, too.

He said as much back on July 24, at the ACC’s annual preseason kickoff event. He walked onto a makeshift stage at the Charlotte Hilton, stood behind a lectern under a glaring light, and said: “What we did last year and the year before and the year before is good. Winning nine games is good. We don’t want to be good, we want to be the best at what we do.”

Doeren and State would’ve taken “good” here on Saturday against Tennessee. They would’ve taken “competitive” or “competent” or “merely worthy of being on the same field as their opponent.” They were not any of those things, though, during a 51-10 nightmare of a defeat — an annihilation that reflected just how far away State is from where it thought it might be.

From where Doeren believed it to be.

“Definitely not what I expected to see from our team,” he said, more than once, late Saturday night. More than once, too, he repeated variations of the obvious: “We just weren’t good enough tonight. Bottom line.”

That was one way to put it.

In a vacuum, one could argue this wasn’t necessarily as terrible as it looked. Sure, Tennessee mostly did what it wanted offensively, especially in the second half. And sure, just moving the ball at times appeared to require Herculean effort on behalf of the Wolfpack — or at least some creative play calling and trickery from Robert Anae, the second-year offensive coordinator.

Tennessee out-gained State 460 yards to 143. The rushing totals — 249 yards for the Volunteers, 39 for the Wolfpack (on a largely ineffective 28 carries) — were particularly gnarly, and indicative of the physical punishment State absorbed. But hey: The Volunteers are good.

They’re well-resourced. They should have better players and more depth and more advantages than a program like State’s, and Tennessee clearly did have a lot more of all of those things, and then some. The greater problem for the Wolfpack, beyond the obvious matter of losing a marquee game by 41 points, is that it looked so impossibly far away on Saturday.

Far away from sustained national relevance. Far away from taking that supposed next step.

Far away from being in a position to even make such a move. The Wolfpack thought it was there, after all — on the precipice. It overhauled its offense through the transfer portal. It spent untold sums of NIL money on supposed talent. It welcomed and embraced everything that came with that — the hype that in this early season now appears to have been overwrought bluster.

“Just snowballed,” Doeren said, and to his credit he didn’t offer any deflections or excuses.

How could he?

He knew the stage was set for State here Saturday night, in a way it rarely ever is for any college football program that’s trying to go from good to great. For months, Sept. 7 in Charlotte had been circled for both the Wolfpack and Volunteers, and throughout the sport at large.

Charlotte’s downtown (or, OK, “uptown”) streets filled with no shortage of all shades of orange throughout Saturday afternoon — but endless red, too. Doeren has sometimes criticized Wolfpack fans for their support of his program, but there could be no complaining Saturday: They showed up.

They even stuck around longer than reasonable before Bank of America Stadium began emptying midway through the third quarter, the final margin the only thing in doubt. The evening turned plenty embarrassing inside the stadium for State and, worse, it was available to the widest possible audience on national television (though why would anyone have wanted to keep watching?).

By the fourth quarter, it was difficult to remember why the people pulling the puppet strings of this entire collegiate sporting enterprise — and remember, those are the TV executives — found this game to be worthy of the prime-time slot on ABC. It was difficult to remember why the A-Team crew of Kirk Herbstreit and Rece Davis (in place of Chris Fowler) had come to spend their time with this mess, and why Kirk’s poor old dog wanted to see the carnage, too — especially against its canine cousins.

But then came the distant memory. The realization that, oh yes: N.C. State was actually ranked entering Saturday night. That this was a matchup between top-25 teams. That the Wolfpack supposed that this could be something of a coming-out party, a moment of national arrival.

Well, so much for that.

And who knows: Maybe this N.C. State team turns out to be decent, or even better. Maybe the Wolfpack picks up the pieces and remains a factor in an ACC race that appears wide open. Stranger things have happened. People wrote off State last year, too, after a sketchy 4-3 start — only for it to win its final five regular-season games.

The stain of what the Wolfpack experienced here Saturday night, though, won’t quickly fade. Everything was there for State around 7:30 p.m. And then, with a sense of so much familiarity and “here we go again,” it was not there. And then it just got ugly. And uglier. And uglier than that.

A few blocks away not all that long ago, Doeren, who’s now 2-16 against top-15 teams during his tenure at N.C. State, said the time was past for the Wolfpack to stop being good.

Well, he didn’t mean it this way.