His Goal Is to Leave Other Team In Check : College football: UCLA’s McCullough adds extra punch to the Bruins’ secondary at strong safety.

Football as a chess game? Seldom to a coach, and almost never to a player maybe because Sega Genesis football games don’t use rooks or pawns or bishops.

And to a player who looks as if he tried to stop a stampede in Lincoln, Neb., with his body?

“It is kind of like a chess match,” Abdul McCullough said. “If somebody has a move that you can’t counter, they keep going to it and going to it, even if you know it’s coming. . . . It’s a real thinking man’s game.”

Nebraska had an option move that McCullough and other UCLA defenders were supposed to counter Saturday, and the Cornhuskers kept going to it and going to it. And, yes, he knew it was coming. He made 12 tackles, most among the Bruins, but made most of them downfield.

“I did not have a good game,” he said. “We lost.”

There are few good defensive games that are lost, 49-21.

“His game wasn’t that bad,” said A.J. Christoff, who coaches the defensive backs. “It’s just that he has set such a personal standard for perfection.”

When in the fourth quarter it was clear that the perfection ship had sailed, McCullough stood on the sideline with the rest of the UCLA starters and decided that he was mad as hell and wasn’t going to take it anymore.

He called Christoff in the press box.

“I told him I wanted to go back in,” McCullough said. “It was more of a pride thing. I didn’t want them to score 50 against us. That’s what we do to (Western Athletic Conference) teams or something, you know?”

McCullough went back in and made two tackles during Nebraska’s final series, which ended on the UCLA six-yard line.

His teammates said he was nuts.

“They said, ‘You’ll get hurt or something if you go back in,’ ” McCullough said. “They said that the game was lost, so let somebody else play.”

Herb Meyer, the coach at El Camino High in Oceanside, could have told them what to expect.

“Abdul has the capacity to do one of two things: Either he can get people excited or he can get them (upset) at him,” Meyer said. “It was part of his competitive nature. You find certain kids who only have one speed and that’s with his throttle wide open, and he can’t understand why everyone else isn’t working at the same speed.

“We had to sit on him. He meant well. He was a tremendous competitor and he played his butt off all the time, and he couldn’t understand why everybody else doesn’t. He’s something different.”

It would seem that Abdul Jabbar McCullough was destined to bring that talent to UCLA from Macon, Ga.

And there was a question as to whether he was ever going to be able to show his football ability. He didn’t play until his freshman year in high school, largely because he wasn’t eligible earlier.

No, not because of grades.

“I’d get all A’s, but I’d get bad citizenship marks,” McCullough said. “Sometimes I’d feel like I was a little too smart for my class. I wasn’t (in the) gifted-and-talented (program), so I had to take some regular classes, and they bored me.”

So he took it out on the teachers.

“The biggest problem with him was that he couldn’t keep his mouth shut in the classroom, even though he was a good student,” Meyer said. “He was the kind of guy that always had to have the last say.”

On the field, he learned quickly. His first lesson was finding that he liked to hit people. That got him special-teams duty as a freshman and playing time at linebacker as a sophomore on the junior varsity.

“Abdul started the first game, and after that we never got him off the field,” Meyer said.

A move to strong safety in his senior season was made because El Camino coaches figured that was where he would get the most attention from college recruiters.

There were plenty. His grades and a 1,290 score on the Scholastic Aptitude Test helped.

His mother wanted him to go to UCLA or Stanford. He liked Washington and Arizona, but he liked Southern California more and so UCLA was the natural choice.

After a redshirt season, he drew acclaim for his special-teams work and won the starting strong safety job this year. He leads the Bruins with 33 tackles, and his work against Southern Methodist cemented his role. He made one tackle after catching a pass receiver 62 yards downfield and later intercepted a pass.

He is the only real tackler in a UCLA secondary of coverage specialists.

“Some people you can see running around the field, trying to avoid people,” he said. “You’ve got to be like a missile: seek and destroy. Don’t pass people by. Give them a little shoulder. I want people to be thinking that there’s somebody waiting if they run a little slant route, or they’re scrambling up the field. They think they’ll just run into a (defensive back).

“I’m not into that. Most of our secondary is corners, skill guys. We’ve got to have someone who takes up the slack in terms of physicality. Our secondary is more in tune to playing Pac-10 teams that are going to pass against you.”