As it commences Saturday evening at Heinz Field, the college football season hereabouts features the muffled clash of two teams that have together lost 10 consecutive games, your Pitt Panthers and your Eastern Michigan Screamin' Eagles, and as storied rivalries go, the story of this one goes something like this:

Once upon a time, a bug flew into a windshield.

The end.

Not twice upon a time. The Panthers and Eagles met only once, in 1995, when good ol' Charlie Batch threw for 264 yards to ensure that Eastern Michigan would lose by barely five touchdowns, 66-30. It shouldn't be a lot different this time as the Eagles begin their 116th season, which looks suspiciously like their ranking among America's 119 Division I-A programs, 116th, although I've seen them as high as 114th. Who's going to argue, except for perhaps fellow bottom-feeders North Texas, Buffalo, Utah State, Temple, Western Kentucky and Florida International, which hopes to dispel the notion that it is the absolute worst program in the land during three hours of vacuous debate Saturday at Penn State.

But somehow -- and this is the one remaining beauty of college football -- this Pitt-EMU fender bender is fraught with pressure. For Pitt, it's a must win, as there is but a small handful of wins available on a schedule heavy with Big East obligations and road games at Michigan State and Virginia.

"There's a lot of pressure, whether you're a player or a coach," Panthers safety Mike Phillips said yesterday on the South Side. "You can't have an off night. In other sports, you can get away with one here or there. But it drives you to do your best."

Uh-huh, and as it happens, there are few people under any more pressure anywhere in sports than a safety in a major-college football program, where simple mistakes can take you out of a game in a climate where one loss is often fateful.

"That's the big thing, the thing coaches always say," Phillips said. "One wrong step, one wrong angle, any miscommunication, can result in a touchdown."

Every defensive player lives with a similar phobia, but many others can hide their mistakes in the wash of collisions up front. When a safety gets beat, even the people watching the touchdown-dancing receiver through binoculars just pan back for the first person in the other uniform. A-hah! His fault.

"You could be just pursuing a play that you had nothin' to do with," Phillips said, "and people will say, 'I saw you get beat for the big play the other night' "

The grad student from Warren, Ohio, laughs at the reality of it, and it is good to see Mike Phillips laugh as he begins a senior season that should be the jumping-off point toward real defensive competence at Pitt. It's not even two years ago that he nearly destroyed his ankle trying to beat Nebraska's tight end to the ball.

"The quarterback had looked off, but then he looked back, right at my guy, and I saw it," Phillips remembered. "I started forward and it felt like I just got bumped a little bit and I was just mad that I dropped the ball. Then I tried to get up and my leg wasn't coming with me. And [then teammate] Kennard Cox, he was always so fired up, so happy and energetic, came over to me and said, 'Just stay down now. Stay down.'

"The worst part, on top of the injury, was that I knew that my mom and dad and two of my brothers were in the stands that day. When they came in the locker room afterward, well, that was bad."

The excruciating rehab left him not quite whole last season, and though he managed to play all 12 games at free safety, he never quite shook the frustration of it all.

"I'd be talking to myself out there," he said. " 'What's the matter Mike? You know you can make that play. You've always made that play.' "

Phillips has to figure Saturday is the start of an autumn that can erase a lot of frustration, not only over his ankle (now "110 percent" he says) but also with the ragged course of a program to which he came eagerly as one of Ohio's top schoolboy defensive backs.

"When coach Wannstedt came, it was like some players just didn't buy into it," Phillips said. "There were some seniors who just wanted to do things their way, but that's long enough past now that the big thing is that Pitt really needs to get back to being a top program. There are no excuses. We have the players and the coaches, the facilities and the city."

For the moment, they're happy to have Eastern Michigan for Saturday. And remember there's no pressure. None at all.