Why Miller Moss thanked his USC senior-thesis advisor in transfer announcement

LOS ANGELES — Two years ago, USC professor Nathan Perl-Rosenthal received an application for his HIST 493 Law, History and Culture thesis course that he found rather interesting: an exploration of the NCAA’s concept of athletic “amateurism” and its modern evolution.

The submission came from Miller Moss.

Perl-Rosenthal, a Harvard graduate and lifelong academic, had seen perhaps two football games in his adult life. He had no idea who Miller Moss was. He knew, simply, that Moss was a Law, History and Culture major and had a strong enough GPA, despite applying as a junior for an honors class generally reserved for seniors. So he admitted Moss as part of a five-person class, the young man the youngest member of the group, en route to his graduating in exactly two years from USC.

It wasn’t until Perl-Rosenthal met him that he learned Moss was a quarterback at USC. He never really learned much else about that, too. But Perl-Rosenthal knew one thing: the Law, History and Culture major did not require taking this honors class, and writing a roughly 60-to-100-page thesis over the course of a year, to graduate. There was “absolutely no reason,” as the professor put it, Moss had to apply.

“It was unusual,” Perl-Rosenthal reflected Monday, asked about his history teaching football players. “That was unusual. Quite unusual, actually.”

Moss enrolled, as Perl-Rosenthal came to learn during the year-long course, because he wanted the intellectual challenge. It was the same reason, ultimately, that Moss came to stay at USC for four years in carving out a path that has become near-unheard of in modern college sports, a former top recruit who sat patiently as a backup for three seasons before getting a shot at a starting job. Valuing a USC degree, as Moss himself said back in the summer, was a large reason he had stuck around.

After an up-and-down season when he lost that starting job, Moss officially transferred from USC on Monday – living, in real time, the changing definition of amateurism he had once explored in his thesis in HIST 493. In a wholly unique decision announcement for a wholly unique USC quarterback, though, Moss gave a specific “special thank you” on social media to Perl-Rosenthal, writing the professor’s guidance “steered me intellectually in ways that I had not been before.”

Perl-Rosenthal had talked with Moss only intermittently since the course finished, about a year and a half ago. He found out about the acknowledgement, in complete surprise, through a request for an interview from the Southern California News Group.

“I do sort of think – football has been his life,” Perl-Rosenthal said, reflecting on Moss’ message of thanks. “But he also wanted to get a good education. And not just, like, check a bunch of boxes and say, ‘I got a good education,’ but actually really challenge himself. Like, that was what was so clear to me.”

It was the final flourish to a path at USC, in a changing era of college athletics, that stands apart from a wide range of Moss’ peers. He grew up, similar to them, on a carousel of private QB coaches; he also grew up competing in chess tournaments, and playing piano, and drawing lists of numbers on pieces of paper. His thesis, focused on that legal definition of amateurism, was in many ways a direct self-reflection of his life as a student-athlete.

“The question of, like, what is a student? What is athletic amateurism in college sports, and is it really – does it really exist, or are we just pretending, right?” Perl-Rosenthal reflected. “That’s kind of the question he was asking.”

They read legal texts like novels, in Perl-Rosenthal’s class. They wrote sections of their thesis, and presented it, and re-wrote it, again and again and again. Moss, Perl-Rosenthal reflected, was “quite a good writer,” and delved back to the very 20th-century origins of NCAA amateurism.

And for a year, Moss frequently stepped inside the context of a historian and outside the context of a football player. The latter, ultimately, is the identity he will be remembered for.

But Moss ultimately stayed as long as he did, at USC, for the concept of the student-athlete he once spent a year exploring with Perl-Rosenthal.

“I think he has a bright future,” Perl-Rosenthal reflected, “regardless of what he decides to do.”