LOS ANGELES — In the span of one season as a quarterback whisperer at USC, Kliff Kingsbury rediscovered his love for coaching football.
Specifically, he rediscovered it because of Miller Moss.
When Kingsbury arrived last year for a quiet reset in Southern California, he was reeling, a head-coaching veteran of only 10 years who had had lost track of his why. He was ousted at Texas Tech in 2018 after three straight losing seasons, and booted from the Arizona Cardinals in 2022 after going 4-13, and wasn’t, as he described, “in the best place mentally.”
So he felt an instant kinship, of sorts, with the golden-haired kid stuck in an impossible situation in USC’s quarterback room.
The guy in front of Moss, as Kingsbury put it, was an “absolute freak.” Caleb Williams, behind Riley, had resurrected USC’s program and was coming off a Heisman Trophy. And yet Moss, then a redshirt-sophomore holdover from the Clay Helton days, still competed, a spark that reignited a dormant fuse in Kingsbury.
“Being in the role I was in,” Kingsbury recalled, “it just kinda flipped that, ‘Hey, I can really share my experiences and what I’d been through, and let’s keep this thing on the right track, both of us, together.’”
For a second consecutive year at USC, Moss pushed Williams in fall camp. For a second consecutive year, he knew he’d end up a backup. Kingsbury could sense Moss was frustrated. Struggling, mentally, as he had, just months earlier.
So after camp wrapped, Kingsbury typed out a hand-picked quote from Winston Churchill and texted it to Moss.
To every man there comes in his lifetime that special moment when he is figuratively tapped on the shoulder and offered a chance to do a very special thing, unique to him and fitted to his talents.
What a tragedy if that moment finds him unprepared or unqualified for that which would be his finest hour.
A full calendar year later, as a refreshed Kingsbury found his way back to the NFL as the Washington Commanders’ offensive coordinator, that tap has found Moss’ broad shoulders. As the tide has swept in and dragged out quarterbacks of all ilk the past four years at USC – Jaxson Dart, Williams, Malachi Nelson – the former Alemany High star has remained rooted to the Southern California sands, undeterred by whispers in his ears from distant seas. And on Monday, a long eight months after seizing his spotlight with a six-touchdown performance in the Holiday Bowl, Moss was officially dubbed USC’s starting quarterback entering the Big Ten.
“He’s got a lot of alpha in him,” Riley said, at the Big Ten media days in late July in Indianapolis.
In truth, Moss has been prepared and qualified for this long before his trials at USC, molded by parents who afforded him every opportunity to grow comfortable in failure from the days he could count. In this age of hyper-specialized positional development, Moss was reared not as a quarterback but a pianist. A chess player. A mathematician. And as that same generation increasingly chases a sped-up timeline in the transfer-portal era, he carries a much broader torch than the one simply left in Troy by Williams – a QB who has waited four long years for his shot.
“I don’t see that happening again,” Kingsbury said.
Moss, many feel, is the last of a soon-to-be-extinct quarterback kind.
When Moss was young, his parents signed him up for a chess tournament called a “simultaneous exhibition.”
A dozen challengers sat at two parallel tables, each with a chessboard in front of them, locked in individual matches with a grandmaster: the highest honor a chess player can receive, and a rank only 1,800 people across the globe can claim.
Moss was 5.
His wavy hair could barely poke over the edge of the tabletop. His legs were too stubby. So he – or someone, his father remembered – piled a stack of phonebooks on his chair and took a seat.
His son lasted 15 moves, Eric Owen Moss recalled. Maybe 16. Almost two decades later, Moss remembered it slightly different.
“I got smoked,” he smiled, speaking to the Southern California News Group at the Big Ten media days in late July. “It was very humbling.”
There are models of quarterbacks, as Owen Moss asserted, who are created to be quarterbacks. At 10 years old, Moss’ face graced the main image of a New Yorker story on the evolution of youth quarterback instruction. Quarterback development, as longtime Elite 11 instructor Justin Hoover said, has long caught up with other disciplines, like pitching, hitting and golfing, that rely heavily on private training.
But this, Owen Moss feels, is not quite his son’s story.
Moss grew up taking weekly art classes, and doing robotics, and playing piano, and wearing a bracelet with a quote from Odysseus in The Iliad.
“He was a savant, so to speak, at a very early age,” said Steve Clarkson, once Moss’ trainer in the New Yorker days.
Moss grew up in the Palisades, a region Owen Moss – a renowned Los Angeles architect – called “homogenous.” It was beautiful. It was also predominantly white, and predominantly upper-class, and not representative of the world, his father felt. So a 10-year-old Moss began playing AAU basketball within programs like the Compton Magic. Within months, in late-game-situations, Magic coach Robert Dawson would look at Moss in the huddle and tell him they were running a play for him.
“I need you,” Dawson would tell him.
Moss would flash him a thumbs-up.
“Just to give him that toughness, that’s what I believe they was doing,” Dawson reflected about Moss’ parents. “They was coming over here, showing, ‘Look, OK, we live over here, but over here, it’s a lot different.’”
The goal, Owen Moss said, was to continue placing targets in front of a young Moss that he couldn’t quite reach until he could. And then find another. And another.
In high school, Moss took a recruiting visit to Cal. There, he and family met with an academic advisor, who told them they’d somehow dug up an elementary-school yearbook in which Moss had written he’d wanted to one day be the Secretary of State.
The advisor, Owen Moss recalled, asked Moss if he was still interested in that. He thought for a second.
“I’d like to be president,” Moss finally responded.
Nobody laughed.
Throughout Moss’ time at USC, Owen Moss said, programs have beckoned him with promises of NIL money and opportunity elsewhere.
At every inflection point in this journey, against all odds – even against all advice – Moss has remained.
“I remember him saying to me once, and I’ll leave out the names, ‘I didn’t come to SC to be the quarterback at XYZ,’” Owen Moss said.
In 2020, USC already had Moss and former top Georgia prospect Jake Garcia committed at quarterback when the program made a run at the more highly touted Dart out of Utah. Trainer Danny Hernandez, a well-known local QB guru, met with Moss and Garcia and suggested they consider decommitting.
Garcia left. Moss’ instant reaction, Hernandez remembered, was to compete.
Dart left, too, after Riley’s arrival in 2021. Moss stayed.
In 2022, after tweaking his hamstring in the Pac-12 championship game, Williams was noticeably hobbled in a blowout loss to Tulane. On the sidelines, Riley repeatedly barked over his headset that Moss could go if Williams couldn’t. But this was a Heisman winner, and it was a tall order to remove him.
It was the moment, Moss reflected in Indianapolis, his patience was tested most. He and Riley had a conversation after that 2022 season, the head coach trying to explain he hadn’t lost confidence in Moss.
Williams came back for another season. Moss stayed.
In 2023, Nelson joined the room, the freshman a five-star prospect out of Los Alamitos long thought to be Williams’ successor. Suddenly, Moss was sandwiched between two former top recruits directly plucked by Riley. Surrounded by sharks, as Hernandez put it.
Nelson transferred after his freshman year. Moss stayed.
He stayed, too, as Riley added UNLV transfer Jayden Maiava this spring and offered no public guarantees Moss was the starter. He has stayed, as Hernandez said, where most would’ve been long gone.
“It’s a dying breed now,” Hernandez said. “The game has changed, and you’re not going to see guys are going to have that same patience.”
Quite simply, Moss stayed because he loves USC. He is in a fraternity. He struts across the street on the mornings of practice like he’s the lead in a 1970s cult-classic coming-of-age comedy. He is often seen on social media palling around with his receivers, and sophomore Ja’Kobi Lane affirmed such activities have helped with their on-field connection. But Lane clarified: They hang out because they’re just, well, friends.
“He’s just, a guy,” said Hoover, the longtime Elite 11 instructor.
“I think it could be refreshing for that locker room, a little bit,” Hoover continued, a few words later. “And I think, because of his personality, and because of quiet confidence and those types of things, I think it comes off as an opportunity to really help them in a year where there’s a lot of change.”
A couple days after UCLA thrashed a listless USC program 38-20 in the Coliseum, Riley called Moss into his office in late November.
Williams was forgoing December’s Holiday Bowl to prepare for the NFL draft, Riley said. Moss was starting.
He was excited, Moss told media in Indy. But his first reaction, he deadpanned, was no yay. USC, down to a 53-player roster between transfers and opt-outs – as Kingsbury referenced – had work to do.
Moss, coaches and players referenced in the weeks throughout USC’s bowl game, prepared like it was his team. It was a team, too, of backups, of players like him young and old who’d grinded in hope of a shot and were finally afforded one. Everyone that no longer wanted to be there, Moss said, had moved on.
“When you get a group of people that collectively is excited to go win a football game,” Moss reflected, “you usually get a pretty positive result.”
And Moss nearly single-handedly pivoted USC’s post-Williams outlook in a 42-28 win full of good vibrations, slinging his way to 372 yards and six touchdowns and operating with the confidence of a four-year starter. But he hadn’t coasted on that win since, he said in Indy.
In June, Moss brought Lane and fellow sophomore receiver Duce Robinson, whose families were back home in Arizona, over to his family’s house for Father’s Day. They were all milling about in Moss’ father’s office, Owen Moss remembered, when someone brought up the Holiday Bowl.
“They’re making too much fuss,” Owen Moss remembered his son saying. “Forget it.”
His persona has few frills beyond, simply, ball. Williams became the singular collegiate model for NIL branding, with The Athletic reporting he’d made around $10 million in his time at USC; Moss’ profile will rise at USC, no doubt, with a quality season. But since the Holiday Bowl, his Instagram feed has been simply every-so-often scattered with promotional content for brands like Hollister and PacSun, teammates howling in the comments.
“so much face,” Robinson wrote under the Hollister post.
“dat boy a model,” Zachariah Branch wrote, with a laughing emoji.
He has that opportunity, now, to be the man at USC, a man whose brand has been built on fortitude. He was raised to last. To hit his targets.
“There’s inevitably going to be adversity,” Moss told reporters in Indianapolis. “And when that adversity comes, you have to have something to fall back on.”
“And I don’t think that comes from any result. I think that comes from your process, and what you’ve put into your game and what you’ve put into the work that you’ve done.”
Somewhere, Winston Churchill smiled.
