Hicks Knows His Absence During Crucial Play Kept Bruins From Winning

It’s an obsession, time invested in the summer in quantifying the definition of a successful season, moments whiled away in bed on Thursday nights determining the requirements of a superior Saturday.

Every play has a point that says mission accomplished. Skip Hicks figures it’s about five yards downfield, and anything else is gravy.

He likes gravy.

Hicks got about 87 yards of it on his first run, a 92-yarder on the game’s second play on Saturday at Pullman, Wash., and he finished his day with about 40 yards of it.

He wanted 150 yards to ease into the season, and he wanted to catch every ball thrown his way and to score two touchdowns against the Cougars. He finished with 190 rushing yards in 27 carries, caught two passes from Cade McNown for 12 yards and doubled his scoring aim.

Goals.

“You have to have a goal for everything,” he said Monday. “You have to have a plan. You’ve got to have a goal for anything you do, or what are you playing for? What are you striving for?

“I try to set a lot of goals for myself, because if you want to get to a certain point, you’ve got to win a lot of little battles to win a war. So you’ve got to take it battle by battle by battle to win the war.”

His war is 2,000 rushing yards, which breaks down to a bit over 181 yards a battle over an 11-game schedule, which is what UCLA will play if it doesn’t improve on its performance in a 37-34 season-opening loss to Washington State.

Goals . . . and burdens.

It still bothers him that it wasn’t 191 rushing yards in 28 carries and five touchdowns.

“It just upsets me because I should have been in the game,” he said then, and even on Monday he was still upset because he figures he should have been physically capable of another yard, another carry, another touchdown.

A win.

Instead, he was standing on the sideline when Jermaine Lewis was thrown back on fourth-and-goal from the one in the game’s waning moments.

On Monday, the conversation was still fresh, though the perspective was a bit clearer.

That’s because on Sunday morning, over a videotape of the game, the fog had gone, his memory had returned, his senses were refreshed.

“I want to make sure that everybody understood that when I came out and when I said [Saturday] I wished I was back in there, [that] I meant that I wished my body was able to let me back in there,” he said. “I was drained. I don’t think I could have gone another step and the coaches knew that.

“Mentally, I was not in it the last couple of plays, and I thought it was best for me and best for the team for me to be on the sideline because I don’t think at that time I could have helped the team out enough.”

He had run the ball 27 times for his 190 yards, had run for two yards, four yards, six yards on the Bruins’ 93-yard drive that finished their offensive day.

On carry No. 26, he swept for five yards to the Washington State nine.

On No. 27, he lost a yard to the 10.

“I could hardly breathe,” he said. “My eyes were blurry. It was like I had just run a mile. It was like I was hyperventilating. [On Sunday] I was watching the film of the last couple of plays, and I was lucky I didn’t make some mistake when I was in there.

“I’m glad I pulled myself out. I thought it was the best thing at the time, and if the coaches watch the film and see what I saw, they would agree with me. I probably shouldn’t have been in there the play before.”

He’s right.

“Skip Hicks was totally exhausted at that time,” said Coach Bob Toledo. “If you look at the videotape, on his last play, he was almost jogging to the line of scrimmage. He had nothing left.”

And so it was left for Lewis, who ran Power-One, an off-tackle play, off guard and fell short on his second college carry, his third college offensive play.

And it’s left for Hicks to ponder, to try to erase the afternoon from his mind because goals accomplished mean only that more goals lie ahead.

And more burdens.

On Saturday against Tennessee, he will need to run for 136 more yards than he could gain a year ago against the Volunteers if he wants to reach his 181-yard benchmark along the road to a 2,000-yard season.

He remembers that game now, but it was a Saturday night he spent in a fog, courtesy of a helmet tackle that separated him from his senses and the football, one that he figures cost the Bruins in a 35-20 loss in Knoxville, Tenn.

It’s a heavy burden, an unfair one really, but it’s one he has thrust on himself, just as on Saturday when he believed he was carrying the UCLA loss at Pullman on his shoulders.

“I felt I let Tennessee and Michigan slip from me [last season] because I was not really as ready as I thought I was,” he said. “Tennessee was probably my first time getting hit since Oregon game [the season before], really. That really took a toll on my body and it took about two or three weeks to get adjusted mentally and physically. Now . . . it shouldn’t affect me.

“It was like one of those deals, once I got that concussion the first week, it took about two or three weeks for my body to recover from that, from getting hit like that.”

He played the rest of the first half with the concussion, then the next week and the next with the memory of it.

He sees clearly now.

“I pretty much can remember what happened,” he says. “I think about that a little bit when I’m watching film. That’s the same team that put a licking on me last year, but I’m stronger and faster and I can take what they can dish out.

“I’m ready for 30 carries. I know the first thing they’re going to say is, ‘this is the same guy we knocked out last year.’ And I know they’re going to be coming after me. I mean, who wouldn’t? . . .

“I’m expecting, going into this game, that the first thing they’re going to do is pound me. I’m going to look for it, even when I’m not getting the ball. I’m going to expect it and I’m going to look for it.”

He’s going to get it, every week, because his goals are public and they are ambitious.

And 30 carries are three more than he had Saturday in Pullman. And two more than he figures he needed for UCLA to win.