FORT COLLINS — Rashard Higgins was so excited playing in front of his mother, Jeanette Jackson, and family last Saturday in San Antonio that the Colorado State receiver ran a deep route from the locker room after the game.
“It was funny, I didn’t take a shower,” Higgins said. “I ran straight out to them. I just wanted to give them hugs and and loving and thanks for coming to the game.”
He confessed that he didn’t shower until the Rams returned to Fort Collins in the early morning hours. His seatmates on the flight home — linebacker Deonte Clyburn and receiver Xavier Williams — were tolerant.
“Luckily, I wasn’t smelling that bad,” Higgins said.
Jackson and the other family members had made the 275-mile drive from the Dallas area, and it was the first time Higgins’ mother had seen her son play a college game. He had five receptions for 103 yards and a touchdown in the win over Texas-San Antonio, and after missing the home overtime loss to Minnesota because of an injury, Higgins has 20 catches for 312 yards and three touchdowns.
Heading into the Rams’ Mountain West Saturday opener at Utah State, Higgins is ahead of his pace through three games last season, when he was a consensus All-America as a sophomore and also missed one game. That’s a bit surprising given his foot injury and the transition from the record-setting Garrett Grayson to Nick Stevens and Coleman Key at quarterback.
“My foot is still kind of bothering me,” Higgins said. “I feel like I’m doing pretty good. Staying healthy is part of my goal. . . To get better is the goal. If that comes with stats and yards, I’m going to try to do it. If I can’t, I’m just going to keep aiming for it.”
CSU coach Mike Bobo said of Higgins: “He’s coming back. I thought he had a better game last week than he did against Colorado.”
Bobo also noted this week that Higgins is close to full participation in practice.
“We’re still holding him out of a little bit of competitive stuff, but the more he practices, the better he’s going to do,” Bobo said. “I expect him to get better every week and be a big-play guy for us, like he was Saturday.”
Stevens acknowledged this week that he should have gotten the ball more to Higgins at San Antonio, but Higgins said the on-field relationship is going well. “Nick, he’s young, so he’s going to miss some of the reads like that. He’ll pick it up. He’ll look at it on film and see that he missed it. I’m not too worried about it. We got the win and that’s all that matters.”
Higgins laughed about the input Stevens gets from Bobo, the former Georgia quarterback and long-time assistant coach. “Coach Bobo rips him apart and lets him know what he did wrong and whoever it was, was open on that play and he should have read the coverage,” Higgins said. “That comes with maturing.”
Higgins also said that kind of quarterback-coach relationship existed with Grayson and former CSU coach Jim McElwain, although McElwain didn’t spend as much time with the quarterbacks as does Bobo. With a laugh, Higgins brought up McElwain’s notorious lambasting of Florida running back Kelvin Taylor for his throat-slash gesture after scoring for the Gators. Higgins said he saw the incident on Instagram.
“I tagged Garrett with it and said, ‘I know you don’t miss this, do you?'” Higgins said. “Garrett was like, ‘Sure don’t.’ Coach Bobo and coach McElwain are both tough on the quarterbacks because that’s a big part of the offense … If I were the head coach, I’d get on the quarterbacks and make them throw the right reads all the time.”
Higgins doesn’t pretend to be immune to constructive criticism, either.
“Oh, he gets on me, absolutely,” he said of Bobo. “Coach (Alivis) Whitted gets on me when we watch film, when I don’t run the right route or get different depth. That’s just part of football.”
As a true freshman in 2013, Higgins was off limits to the media. As a sophomore a year ago, he enjoyed talking about his “Hollywood” nickname and image, usually in subdued tones that made his words seem far less flamboyant in person than they came off in print. This season, he is more of a leader, again unsurprising considering he is coming off being a Biletnikoff Award finalist and seems to be likely to declare for the 2016 NFL draft.
“I’d say just growing individually,” he said. “Also, on the field, I think I’ve become the leader vocally. I wasn’t a leader vocally last year, I was just a leader by action. Now I think I’m stepping into that role of being a louder person on the field.”
Terry Frei: tfrei@denverpost.com or @tfrei
