With just a few weeks remaining before the start of Florida State's preseason football practice, now seems like a good time to offer up a special Offseason 3-2-1, where we provide three observations, two questions and a prediction regarding FSU athletics.

In this edition, we'll tackle the debate about Florida State's lagging season ticket sales, the newly empowered Florida State University Athletics Association, some on-field football topics and more.

1 -- It all comes down to the 'F' word ... Fun

We've had quite a spirited debate on the Warchant message boards in recent days following our report that Florida State's season ticket sales for football are experiencing a major swoon following back-to-back sub-par seasons.

Gene Williams provided what he believes are the major reasons for those poor sales in his Five Takes column, and hundreds of fans have chimed in with their various perspectives and experiences. While all of these different views are valid and make up different pieces of this puzzle, I think everything that we're talking about here can be summed up with one simple sentence:

Attending Florida State football games in person hasn't been fun enough in recent years to justify the great expense for many fans.

It's as simple as that.

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We can rattle off all the different things we're not happy about with the Seminoles' football program -- whether it be the coaches, the talent, the schemes, the uniforms, the music selections, the scoreboard, the turnover backpack, whatever. The bottom line is Florida State's football program is competing for entertainment dollars just like everybody else, and the product just hasn't been all that entertaining in five or six years.

And that wasn't a typo. We're talking about five or six years.

Like many of Florida State's issues, this problem didn't start with Willie Taggart. It's really been since that magical 2013 season that FSU fans have gone to the stadium each week with high expectations and gone home feeling great about what they just saw. Even in 2014, when the Seminoles were still in the midst of their unbeaten streak, the games were often more exasperating than entertaining.

It was cool to keep winning. But the offense was often sloppy and the defense was uninspired. That team was just so much more talented than its opponents that Jameis Winston could turn it on in the second half, and the 'Noles would find a way to pull out the victory.

Then 2015 and 2016 really started the downward spiral. Yes, those teams each won 10 games. Yes, Dalvin Cook made a hell of a lot of jaw-dropping plays. But other than that, I don't think many people would describe those years as having "fun" teams.

Part of it was that the talent was beginning to drop off, but another part of it was Fisher's ultra-conservative approach. He was so risk averse, and played everything so close to the vest, that he often kept games closer than they needed to be.

Don't get me wrong -- winning is always better than losing. And Fisher won a lot. But he also believed philosophically that a 10-7 victory was just as gratifying as a 48-10 rout, and I'm here to tell you that it isn't. At least not against common opponents.

That's why everyone was so excited about Willie Taggart's arrival and all of his bold statements about scoring fast and scoring often. While that type of talk would excite any fan base anywhere, it was especially impactful here because things had gotten so dull in Fisher's final few years.

Then 2018 happened, and we all found out how un-entertaining college football could really be. So is anyone all that surprised that fans aren't lining up to buy tickets?

This all became crystal clear to me while making an appearance on a Jacksonville radio show on Tuesday to discuss our stories about FSU's lagging ticket sales. The host asked a pretty simple question: "Is the biggest problem this year's home schedule? Or is it the play on the field?"

Well, I've been combining those two factors in my mind for the last several months. But when you think about it like that, the answer is painfully obvious -- it's the play on the field.

This 2019 home slate is a contributing factor, but it's not the root cause. If fans believed Florida State was going to play a winning -- and entertaining -- brand of football, there would not be such a drastic drop-off in ticket sales. Plenty of people would fork over the cash and make their five or six trips to Tallahassee this fall if they thought they were going to see a fun football team playing the game the way it's supposed to be played.

But when the team is playing poorly AND the schedule is unappealing, that's a double whammy. And then we can add in all of these other factors related to the game-day experience.