LOS ANGELES — In the span of one season as a quarterback whisper 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’d had quite simply 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 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.