Atlanta, GA--Vanderbilt was humbled on Saturday night.

A team that was on top of the world and thinking big for the season's first two weeks looked human in a way that it hadn't yet on Saturday. Vanderbilt quickly fell from the mountaintop to rock bottom as it fell 36-32 to Georgia State.

Instead of affirming what it had shown in its first two weeks, Vanderbilt fell into the temptation of the demons of its past.

The temptation to believe that it is good enough to come in and beat a team like this regardless of its intensity has plagued this program far too often over the years.

Clark Lea's team got a wake up call on Saturday that they aren't. That wake up call may have cost Lea and his group a chance at bowl eligibility and a season in which it shocked everyone as underdogs.

On Saturday, Vanderbilt was victim to Georgia State taking on that same mindset and exploiting its lack of one.

The swagger was gone on Saturday night. The edge was gone. The affirmation of change was, too.

For the first time in 2024, this looked like the same old program with the same old mentality.

It lost in the margins, over and over again. It set the tone for the night by handing Georgia State the ball deep within Vanderbilt territory. It followed that up with mental mistakes like Steven Sannienola's self-induced safety on the kick return and a penalty for having two players with the same jersey number on the field.

The mistakes kept piling up and Vanderbilt didn't have an answer for them.

It was outplayed and outcoached.

That just can't happen at this stage of this program's build.

Neither can nights like this.

Vanderbilt shouldn't be playing in half-empty SunBelt stadiums, it shouldn't be coming into them with a lack of edge and it shouldn't be losing to the opponents in them.

Those things shouldn't even be a thought for a program at this level, instead they're reality.

Reality has now set in for Lea's program. Rather than being one of America's best stories, they're now a team that needs to prove their worth to the country again.

The momentum is gone. The buzz is gone.

Where this thing goes from here will be determined by what Vanderbilt is made of. It's been at the top, now it's seen the other side of the spectrum.

Is the chip still there? Is the confidence? Or are those things merely a product of the results that Vanderbilt has experienced early on?

As Vanderbilt faces off against two AP top 10 teams in its next two games that will be tested.

Those test look a lot more daunting after what transpired on Saturday night. So do Vanderbilt's hopes of playing beyond the regular season.

Just when it looked as if this program may have turned the corner, it was reminded that its success is seldom simple and seldom linear.

Nights like Saturday night can't keep happening.

But, they do.