CHRONOLOGY OF UCLA’S U-TURN

It was a hot Wednesday afternoon in September, and Skip Hicks had just run the wrong way on a screen pass. Only four days earlier, Hicks had run the right way on that play for 50 yards and a touchdown against Tennessee.

But on this day, Bob Toledo’s tolerance hit the red zone.

UCLA’s football coach had spent two weeks defending the Bruins against critics, two weeks keeping irritated assistants from hammering the fragile psyches of the Bruins, two weeks answering questions about his coaching acumen.

“Why didn’t you call timeout against Washington State?”

“Why did you run on third down against Tennessee?”

UCLA was an 0-2 team in trouble, the game against 11th-ranked Texas was three days away and it was time to pass the heat along.

Toledo yelled at Mike Kaplan, keeper of the Spaulding Field clock, “Blow the horn!” then gathered the Bruins in the middle of the field, lashed them with his tongue and sent them packing.

With 20 minutes of practice time remaining.

“It’s a little bit hot and they are a little tired, and it’s going to be hot and they’re going to be tired at Texas and I don’t want them feeling sorry for themselves,” Toledo said then. “We don’t concentrate when things get tough and [we] start feeling sorry for ourselves and I’m not going to accept that.”

Message sent.

A bit later, when he had cooled and begun worrying a bit, Toledo said, “Maybe I’m overreacting. They want to win, but sometimes they don’t want to prepare to win. Everybody can talk about winning, but they need to prepare to win. You might as well not practice as do this.”

It was a close call.

“They could have gone one of two ways,” Toledo said Monday in reflection. “They could either respond to what you want, or they could turn their back on you and you’ve lost them.”

The next day, players caught passes, lined up where they were supposed to, ran in the right direction and--some--went up to Toledo to ask for a critique of the day’s work.

Message received.

Two days later, the Bruins ran over Texas, 66-3, becoming a 1-2 team that was ranked 24th in the country.

Eleven weeks later, they are ranked sixth, winners of nine consecutive games and en route to a major bowl game.

The critics have been answered, the challenge has been met and Toledo has a contract extension that’s going to keep him in the salary stratosphere into the next millennium.

“If we had lost to Texas, I would have had to say, ‘Now the preseason is over and we can concentrate on the real season,’ ” he said. “That was about the only thing I could have done. Thank God I didn’t have to find out.”

For all of the “Tricky Toledo” aura he has taken on in Westwood, he has injected a bit of calm into a roiled program and has engendered confidence in players who were unsure of themselves.

He also has woven weekly themes, the products of a tape recorder he has almost worn out in traffic between Westwood and his home in Westlake Village. While assistants work on game plans, he works on head games to play with the Bruins, planning daily post-practice messages, Friday night talks at a hotel, Saturday morning talks before buses are boarded, pregame talks, even postgame talks.

Sometimes, it’s easy. After Texas, there was a week off and then Arizona.

On the Friday night before the Arizona game, the Bruins watched a highlight tape of the 1993 UCLA team, which had lost its first two games but spent New Year’s Day in Pasadena.

“I thought about it for a year,” Toledo said. “I thought about the pregame, and it was going to be what we had done all week, which is line them up after stretching and going one on one.”

The idea was to dispel the notion that the Bruins were soft. That they wore baby blue, had a coach who had to resort to trick plays to beat anybody and were from Southern California, where toughness is something you find in a Clint Eastwood movie.

“That was the point where I needed to prove to our team, to people who were watching our football program, that we were a much more physical team,” Toledo said.

He had about 10 feet of adhesive taped onto the floor of the locker room at the Rose Bowl and had players in game uniforms, minutes before kickoff, knocking the hell out of each other, one on one.

UCLA 40, Arizona 27.

Said Wildcat wide receiver Dennis Northcutt, “They were tougher than us.”

And they were 2-2.

Houston was next, and was easy enough, but there could be no letdown. Coaches yelled at players during the week as though USC were the opponent.

“When you win, it’s easier to do that,” Toledo said. “The kids buy into what you’re doing. There’s a real trust right now between players and coaches. They trust what we’re doing is right.”

UCLA 66, Houston 10.

The Bruins were 3-2, and the rest of the way would be played against the Pac-10.

On Friday night before the Oregon game, Toledo told the Bruins that they had had things easy for three weeks, and the numbers bore him out. UCLA had outscored Texas, Houston and Arizona, 172-40.

“We told them that we weren’t going to have it as easy as we have had it the last three weeks, and that we were going to have to play a 60-minute game sometime and this might be it,” Toledo said.

It was. Oregon ran up a 21-10 lead before UCLA caught and passed the Ducks, winning, 39-31.

Oregon State’s last Pac-10 victory had been scored against UCLA in 1995, something the Bruins were reminded of all week before the game against the Beavers.

“I told the players that [Bruin defensive coordinator] Rocky Long had been over there, and that Rocky had said that the players didn’t think UCLA was very tough,” Toledo said.

They were tough enough to win, 34-10.

And to beat California, 35-17.

“It was homecoming, and I told them about all the old guys that were coming back to see what we had done,” Toledo said.

And then came Stanford and the guarantee that wasn’t.

Toledo had talked all week about the Cardinal’s 21-20 win that had knocked UCLA out of bowl consideration the previous season, and as he boarded the plane from Los Angeles to San Jose on Friday, daughter Alissa told him her boyfriend Chip had a brother in the Bay Area who had read something interesting.

He hadn’t, but that’s merely a detail.

“Coach Toledo told us that he had heard that Chad Hutchinson had said in one of the papers up here that he guaranteed a win,” safety Shaun Williams said. “I kind of took that personal.”

The Bruins took it out on Stanford, 27-7, throwing the Cardinal rushing game for 34 yards in losses. Much of that lost yardage came on the six sacks of Hutchinson, who hadn’t guaranteed anything.

After another week off, the best was to come.

November was a single-elimination tournament, Toledo said, and the prize was a berth in the Rose Bowl. As important, though, there was a ghost to exorcise. He had had his lowest day at UCLA on Oct. 19, 1996, when Washington hammered the Bruins, 41-21.

He was searching for something, anything, to add to the emotion that was already mounting with a team that had won seven in a row.

He got it from Northwestern, which sent 48 sets of purple football pants for the Bruin scout team, and from the UCLA equipment staff, which sent out the scouts’ gold helmets to be painted purple.

On Tuesday before the game, the scouts gathered in Pauley Pavilion while the regular Bruins stretched at Spaulding Field with quizzical looks on their faces. When the scouts came out, they were greeted with derision by the regular players. It was the best week of practice UCLA had all season.

And Toledo wasn’t finished.

He had asked Ken Norris of the UCLA video staff to prepare a tape of Bruin special-team successes against Washington all the way back to the 1954 UCLA national championship season.

Not shown were the special-teams debacles of the previous season’s game.

“I figured that we would win one of the two sides, offense or defense,” Toledo said. “Then, if we could win special teams, that would be 2-1.”

The tape was shown to the Bruins before they boarded the buses Saturday morning for the short trip to the Rose Bowl, where they won on offense, on defense and on special teams in a 52-28 thumping of the Huskies.

That left USC.

And a letdown.

Though he put on a happy face about playing against the Bruin rivals, Toledo was concerned all week that UCLA had played as well as it was able against Washington, that there might not be anything left in the emotional tank for USC.

Thank you R. Jay Soward. Much obliged, Bob Trumpy.

“I showed them a video of R. Jay Soward going scr-i-i-i-i-ck and saying, ‘Five wins in a row. It ends here,’ ” said Toledo, emulating Soward cutting his hand across his neck the previous year.

Then he showed the Notre Dame-USC pregame in which Trumpy had told NBC audiences that USC was the football power in Los Angeles now that the pro game has gone elsewhere, and that UCLA was a basketball school and didn’t matter.

And he showed highlights of the 48-41 Bruin victory in double overtime the previous season.

UCLA 31, USC 24.

Nine consecutive victories.

Nine weeks of challenges met, with the streak taking on a life of its own.

“I was always looking for things,” Toledo said. “It becomes very stressful. The more success you have, the more success you want to have.

“We have had such great chemistry.”

The formula: Take one part offense, one part defense, one part special teams. Add some toughness and stir with a Wednesday afternoon in September, when a frustrated coach decided he was mad as hell and wasn’t going to take it anymore.