In the lead up to his first game as Florida State’s head coach, Willie Taggart said that the honeymoon phase was over.

He didn’t know how true that was going to be.

Taggart did everything right this off-season.

He brought back Bobby Bowden. He brought back the former players. He set about repairing a fractured football program. He had the players and fans buying in.

After two games, a lot of the good will that he'd earned is gone.

FSU looked awful in its season opener against a ranked Virginia Tech team on Monday night. The Seminoles followed up that performance by looking even worse against FCS opponent Samford on Saturday.

FSU couldn't run the ball behind a porous offensive line, couldn't stop Samford quarterback Devlin Hodges, and Ricky Aguayo couldn't make field goals and is now 1-for-4 to start the season.

AN UNNERVING WIN:

The Seminoles managed to pull out the win after taking their first lead of the 2018 season with four minutes to go in the fourth quarter and then adding on an extra touchdown on defense with a pick-six from cornerback Levonta Taylor to make it look a little better.

But it doesn't change the fact that for almost the entire game FSU didn't look like the team with the edge in talent and the edge in depth.

"We played a bad game going into the fourth quarter and we just had to finish through," FSU tight end Tre' McKitty said.

"I feel like we've got a lot more improvement to do as far as just penalties and stuff like that. We really just killed ourselves stopping drives by getting stupid penalties and stuff like that."

It was a failure in all three phases of the game, and it leaves me wondering how Taggart can recover from this in 2018.

There's no way to fix the offensive line issues this season because FSU doesn't have the personnel to do so.

"It kind of is what it is," Taggart said.

"We knew coming in that that was one area that we were thin at. Can’t make no excuses. The next guy has to be up and be ready to go. We’ve got to watch the film and see what we did wrong and try to improve on those things."

The defense gave up 525 yards and 475 passing yards to the Bulldogs and didn't record a single sack and didn't have a tackle for loss until the final minutes of the third quarter.

Looking bad against VT in the season opener wasn't what fans wanted to see, but at least it was explainable.

Bud Foster is one of the top defensive coordinators in college football and had the Hokies dialed up and ready to play.

And while I know that Taggart inherited a 7-6 team with some major issues, there's no excuses for being in a dog fight with an FCS team when you're Florida State no matter how good of an FCS team they are.

"We’ve got to continue to evaluate and see if we can be better," Taggart said.

"We took the ball first this game hoping that we could start fast. First game we took it in the second half... The biggest thing is looking at what we’re doing schematically and technically and try to correct it to make sure that our guys are doing it the way we need them to do it."

Taggart and the rest of the coaching staff are going to have to take a long look in the mirror and figure out what works and what doesn't because the games don't get any easier than this.

And he's going to have to do it quickly with a Syracuse team that's known for putting up points up next on the docket. The Orange have put up 117 points in their two games so far, albeit against subpar competition.

FSU's going to have to find a way to keep up on the scoreboard, but that's not going to happen unless something changes over the next seven days.

This was supposed to be the easy part of FSU's schedule with Samford, Syracuse, and Northern Illinois on the docket, but with the way the Seminoles struggled on Saturday night, there are not any sure wins left.

After that three-game stretch it gets really tough for FSU and the schedule doesn't get any easier the rest of the way.

I will be the first to say that I bought into the hype of this team during the off-season and fall camp.

It's not Taggart's fault that the offensive line is the way it is currently. That fault lies with the preview staff.

But I know the talent that FSU had recruited everywhere except the offensive line, and I thought the Seminoles would be able to mask those issues better than they have with the system and play calling.

That hasn't happened and now Taggart is going to have to prove that he can get the job done because what FSU has put on the field in the first two games isn't up to the FSU standard.