Wilcox Won’t Return to Bruins This Year : UCLA: A series of head injuries trouble starting defensive tackle and could force him to give up football.

Bryan Wilcox, a starting defensive tackle who has been out of the lineup for almost a month because of a concussion, said Thursday that he will not play for UCLA again this season and may quit football altogether.

Wilcox, a 6-foot-7, 268-pound junior from Libertyville, Ill., has had concussions “four or five times” in the last several years, he said, and is concerned about the recurring head injuries.

The most serious of them occurred in a game against Arizona last season and in a practice last month, three days before the Bruins played Michigan.

“Right now, I’m feeling that I just need a little time away to collect my thoughts and (decide), ‘Is it worth it?’ ” Wilcox said. “I know the way it makes my head feel and it’s not a good feeling. Right now, I’m a little wary about going out there and risking it.”

Wilcox suffered his most recent injury on what he described as a routine play, butting heads with an offensive lineman in practice.

“As soon as we hit helmets, I saw black in front of my eyes and then I saw a sheet of white,” he said. “The next thing I knew, I stood up and my vision was really blurred. The headache progressed after that.”

Wilcox played briefly in UCLA’s 24-23 loss to Michigan, but took himself out of the game.

“I felt like I was going to fall down on national TV,” he said.

Then, for two more weeks, he said, he felt out of sorts. His vision was affected and he experienced a “fuzzy, lost kind of feeling.”

Just last week, he said, his head throbbed as he read a book.

“Whenever I’m concentrating on something for a period of time--like when I’m focusing on the letters on a page--I get a headache and it kind of makes me break into a sweat,” he said.

What Wilcox finds especially troublesome is that he was injured so seriously on a play that is so commonplace along the line of scrimmage.

“It was a double-team,” he said. “We were standing right in front of each other and, bang, it happened. That’s just a routine block. It happens every day in practice and every day in games.

“That’s one thing that made me start to wonder if this was going to keep on happening to me.”

Coach Terry Donahue has asked Wilcox to decide by January if he will return to the team next season, Wilcox said.

“I’m a little confused,” Wilcox said. “I’ve played football all my life and it’s been a major part of my life for so many years that it makes the decision tough. But, then again, I look and see what football has done to me and I have to wonder, ‘Is it going to get worse?’ And if it does, what am I going to do?”

Gerald Finerman, the Bruins’ team physician, said that Wilcox suffers from trauma-related migraine headaches and that his condition probably could be treated with medication, “which we would give him if he elected to resume (playing) football.”

Wilcox, who started last season and had four sacks before he was injured, is the sixth defensive player lost to the Bruins this season. Strong safety Anthony Burnett flunked out, free safety Eric Nelson had reconstructive knee surgery and free safety Willie Crawford, linebacker Roman Phifer and cornerback Damion Lyons were suspended.