It's become a rite of winter passage for N.C. State basketball.

The first ACC game of the season is at hand, and Wolfpack fans are already skeptical about Herb Sendek's ability to win. Among those in red and white, restlessness and short, cold days run hand-in-mitten.

In his eighth season at State, Sendek has become a classic survivor, ranking behind only Duke's Mike Krzyzewski and Maryland's Gary Williams in ACC coaching seniority but never having finished better than 9-7 in the league.

Sendek often has coached in the style of a battered prizefighter -- against the ropes, out of a crouch -- in an eternal struggle to fend off foes and Pack fans.

This season will be no different.

The Pack (5-2) hasn't won a game of real merit. On the road against Michigan and South Carolina, Sendek's team was sluggish and offensively inconsistent.

In other words, the Pack has lost ugly, just as it often wins ugly -- a tormenting, stop-and-go ordeal that frustrates fans while making genuine momentum elusive.

Sendek occasionally uses the phrase "chopping wood" to describe his team's work ethic. But to many fans, it's more like chopping concrete, lots of labor for rewards that come hard, if at all.

When undefeated Virginia arrives at the RBC Center for tonight's game, Sendek will be under pressure to end a dull December on a positive note.

That should sound familiar. Just last season, State opened its ACC schedule by beating the Cavaliers 75-63 Jan. 5 in the RBC, but the crowd of 14,718 was quieter and smaller than expected, likely a consequence of several wins over faceless foes with losses to Gonzaga and Massachusetts.

"We have to prove to our fans that we deserve their support," then-senior Cliff Crawford said after the Virginia game.

Eventually, the Pack did just that. For the second straight season, it finished 9-7 in the ACC, reached the conference championship game and earned an NCAA bid. That ran Sendek's records at State to 44-68 in league regular-season play, 10-7 in the league tournament and 127-98 overall.

Barring a terrible record this season, Sendek is in no job danger. Nor should he be. Since managing to survive after a 13-16 season and 5-11 ACC mark in 2000-01, he has done enough to earn some security.

But winning enough to keep his job and winning enough to generate high morale in the stands are two different matters.

Sendek clearly is lagging on the second count. His elaborate motion offense is a work of coaching art when it clicks. But it has done little to create excitement, and his teams never have been able to win enough in the conference to shake the image of a program treading water.

Just when everything seems to be in place for a stride forward, something backfires -- a costly injury here, the transfer of a key player there. The promising 1999-2000 season was unraveled by a single foul, a technical call against Damon Thornton at Maryland. State lost at Duke that season after its smartest player, point guard Justin Gainey, called a timeout that the Pack didn't have.

All of this has produced the Halfway Herb Society, a large and proactive collection of State fans who like the coach as a person but have lost faith in his ability to win big. Many of the members will be there tonight, halfway pulling for State to win but halfway hoping that Sendek will blunder enough to sway Chancellor Marye Anne Fox to get rid of him.

Sendek may not be the next Gary Williams, and certainly is not the next Mike Krzyzewski, but it's hardly fair to paint the State coach as a flop. He has been hurt by State's basketball history and comparisons to popular football coach Chuck Amato.

While it is true that State won national championships under Norm Sloan and Jim Valvano, it's also true that Sloan was a relatively modest 103-77 in ACC regular-season play and Valvano 71-69.

Since Everett Case's last full season in 1964, State has won at least 10 ACC games only five times. Even the famed 1983 NCAA championship team was only 8-6 in the league.

But like Amato, who's only 17-15 in ACC play, Sloan and Valvano had fiery personalities that kept fans' emotions high during the off years. Sendek doesn't have the charisma to play that card. He's left to stand or stumble on his game-to-game results.

Nothing short of a break-through season -- an ACC title, a top-10 final ranking or a Final Four run -- ever will quiet his critics.

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