TALLAHASSEE, Fla. — Chuck Amato woke up Saturday morning at 3 a.m. and he couldn’t go back to sleep.

He trudged over to the Florida State football team’s training facility and worked out for two-and-a-half hours. His mind was on this weekend’s matchup with his former team.

“Then I wanted to go back to bed,” Amato said. “But I couldn’t because I had to come here and coach a game.”

Amato said he wasn’t nervous the week before the game, but it really hit him the night before.

After coaching N.C. State for seven years, Amato, now linebackers coach at FSU, didn’t greet his players before the game or during halftime, waiting for after the Seminoles’ 27-10 win.

He said getting a win over his former team is bittersweet.

“They are a bunch of winners over there and they don’t quit,” Amato said. “They didn’t quit for seven years, and guess what, they still won’t, and that’s the greatest tribute they can give a coach.”

Amato met with a number of his former players after the game, including quarterback Daniel Evans and receiver Darrell Blackman, though Amato couldn’t remember all the players he talked to.

Evans said the thought of Amato on the opposite sideline didn’t affect Evans’ play.

“I didn’t really think about it at all until after the game, and then I saw him,” Evans said. “He just told us to keep our heads up.”

Amato went 3-9 in his last season with State, leading to his dismissal. Now as the Pack sits at 1-5, Amato said he feels for his former team.

“Their record doesn’t show the kind of winners they really are,” Amato said.

But his new boss, FSU coach Bobby Bowden, said it was important for Amato to get a win against the Pack.

“It was very important for Chuck because those are his boys,” Bowden said. “He’d hate to have come down here and lost to them. It’d be a real slap in the face.”

Amato did admit though that he had to feel some pride when one of the players he had recruited made a good play.

“The one thing I think we knew how to do there was recruit,” Amato said. “There’s a lot of good players on that football team — I told our coaches that.”

One of those players, running back Jamelle Eugene, got a chance to shine for the first time, as an injury to starting back Andre Brown gave Eugene the majority of the carries Saturday.

Amato had recruited Brown, Eugene and Toney Baker, another high-touted running back who suffered a season-ending injury against Central Florida.

“[Eugene’s] as good as they come — he’s a hard runner,” Amato said. “I remember when they were all three freshmen and Toney and Andre were getting all kinds of snaps in two-a-days. I told them ‘let’s get Jamelle in there’ and we couldn’t tackle him.”

Though he said he didn’t have any specific flashbacks to his time in Raleigh during Saturday’s game, Amato said he was tempted to don his old garb.

“I almost put the red shoes on so you’d have something to write about,” he said.