It's taken what seems like forever, but a North Carolina vs. N.C. State football game is about to be played amid a relatively low degree of coaching pressure.

That's a good thing, and it should be fertile ground for producing an exciting show on Saturday in the Wolfpack's Carter-Finley Stadium.

For the past couple of seasons, former coaches Chuck Amato of State and John Bunting of Carolina were in such hot water with their fans and administrations that the game itself was less important than its implications.

The same pattern held before Amato and Bunting were hired, too. Carolina's Carl Torbush and State's Mike O'Cain, who were good friends off the field, often met under the same storm cloud of job insecurity. It reached the point that one felt sorry for the other.

Whether the players admit it or not, that sort of tension and uncertainty is impossible to confine to the coaching office. The players aren't dumb. They were instructed to duck questions about a coach's status or the ramifications of any given game, but the players don't live in a vacuum. They know the score. They know perfectly well when their coach is in trouble, and that knowledge definitely affects their play.

The Wolfpack players, at Chapel Hill last year, clearly were scared. They weren't afraid of Carolina, of course. But they knew a loss would probably seal Amato's doom and the result was a hesitant, restrained performance. It was a classic case of a team trying so hard not to lose that all sight of trying to win was forgotten from the moment their 20-14 loss at Clemson the week before was finalized.

Carolina's players arrived from the opposite extreme. Bunting had already been fired, but he was still coaching the team and his players literally had nothing to lose. The Tar Heels gained a modest 260 yards of total offense but won the game by 14 points, primarily because they capitalized on the Pack's mental mistakes.

Lou Holtz, during his coaching stint at State in the 1970s, once said that his greatest fear entering a game against Carolina was showing up with a tense team.

"It's easy to get yourself so wound up that you can't get yourself unwound. That can lead to a complete breakdown in execution," Holtz said.

That sort of anxiety shouldn't undermine the game Saturday. Obviously, there is a certain level of game stakes. The Pack, after a disappointing early season, is trying to inch its way back and win enough games to grab a bowl bid. The Heels can do no better than 6-6, but six wins is the threshold for bowl eligibility.

But a loss won't cause State's Tom O'Brien or Carolina's Butch Davis apply for immediate consideration into the witness protection program.

This is hopefully the first of many showdowns between the two series newcomers. May they both live long, supervise model programs and prosper. More than anything else, that is what the State-Carolina rivalry needs for a while. It's time for the Heels and Pack to again play for something, rather than trying to avoid something.