The Florida State ticket office is trying, trying, trying, to push interest in this upcoming Saturday’s game between the Seminoles and the Miami Hurricanes.

Imagine seeing this tweet when the rivalry was anywhere near its peak – not AT its peak, but anywhere remotely close to it:

We’ve eclipsed the 10K mark in the student section for Saturday’s @FSUFootball game vs Miami Keep it going #Noles pic.twitter.com/znfIvuXErz — FSU Tickets (@FSUTickets) October 28, 2019

The 10,000-ticket mark is 6,000 short of the full 16,000 allotment for students. That is merely one of the indicators of how far this rivalry has fallen in 2019.

Let’s be clear: The rivalry isn’t a lifeless rivalry on a broader, general level. When Jimbo Fisher was at Florida State not too long ago, this series still popped. Miami had a chance to make resounding statements about its legitimacy, and came close to doing so until its breakthrough in 2017. This is not a long-term erosion of Noles-Canes. This is a short-term collapse, with Saturday’s game matching a pair of 4-4 teams. The loser will be in deep danger of missing a bowl game.

It would be jarring to see Doak Campbell Stadium, a ballyard stuffed with memories of electric nights and afternoons, having 10,000 or 15,000 or maybe more, empty seats for The U.

There is a large dose of irony attached to this game from a Florida State perspective if you stop and think about the larger history of this rivalry, dating back to the late 1980s.

Florida State-Miami was usually an early October game, sometimes a Week 1 game, in its heyday. Miami was the team which usually relied more on its defense and played a more cautious style built on limiting mistakes. Florida State was usually the much more ambitious team under Bobby Bowden. The Seminoles were a lot more likely to use gadget plays and take bigger in-game risks.

Given this contrast when FSU-Miami reached its greatest height, the prevailing line of thought about the early October or Week 1 meetings between these teams is that they generally favored Miami.

“If only Florida State could play this game in November,” the argument went, “the Seminoles and Bobby Bowden would have had a lot more national titles.”

Whether you agree with that thought process or not (I do…), it has to be a bitter pill to swallow: The game has been moved back to November this year, ideally in the hope that the late-season placement of the game would make it bigger.

Instead, the late-season placement has made it worse in 2019.

If this game had been scheduled on the first weekend of October, neither fan base would have been happy, but there still would have been a sense that with two months left in the season, FSU-Miami could form a pivot point for these programs.

Now, in Week 10? Forget it. These programs are just trying to make a bottom-tier bowl game in a place such as Shreveport or Annapolis. There is no high-end goal to shoot for, only to win this rivalry game and save face to a modest extent.

The November schedule placement many Florida State fans have longed for has blown up in the face of this rivalry and college football. Miami and FSU will slug it out at the same time the Florida Gators will play Georgia in Week 10’s biggest clash.

If the Gators are happy to overshadow a Miami-FSU game in which ticket sales have been conspicuously sluggish, you know something is severely amiss.

The late 1980s and early 1990s could not be more distant in the public memory this week.