**This is the first installment of our USC Next Up feature series, profiling USC's 2021 freshmen. All interviews with the players were conducted before they arrived on campus and enrolled at USC. This Dart interview took place in early January and has been held for inclusion in this series.**

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KAYSVILLE, Utah -- This time a year ago, USC freshman quarterback Jaxson Dart wasn't a highly-rated, highly-coveted four-star prospect. He wasn't the talk of spring practice at USC, a potential future face of one of college football's proudest programs, a Utah state record holder or a Gatorade National Player of the Year.

That's not to say he wasn't the same caliber of QB capable of all those feats back then -- it's just that nobody had bothered to really notice yet.

Well, almost nobody.

Some Ivy League programs had shown interest, Southern Utah was involved, local BYU was willing to consider him if he'd wait an extra semester to enroll. And Louisiana, out of the Sun Belt Conference, had given Dart his best scholarship offer to date but it came with a quick expiration date.

"It was probably three weeks after they offered me that they said, 'Hey, we're going to take this kid.' And they already had one kid committed. So they kind of gave me a heads up. They're like, 'We'll either take you right now or we're going to take this kid.' And then it was just like, I'm going to wait this out," Dart recalls. "So at that time, my offers were Yale, Penn and a grayshirt to BYU, hoping for a season."

Brandon Dart, his father, adds: "I knew if we played we'd be fine, but he just had to get into that game."

Everything was riding on Dart's senior season, which wasn't a lock to take place due to the pandemic.

He had spent three years as the starting quarterback at Roy High School in Utah, but on a team that had maybe a couple linemen bigger than he was, the offense was geared toward moving the pocket and not getting the QB demolished rather than maximizing his full range of capabilities. On a roster thin on D1 prospects, his accomplishments there flew under the radar. He'd also missed out on the camp and showcase circuit while playing travel-league baseball in the spring and summers.

Meanwhile, Dart would make trips to California at least once a month to work out with the 3DQB team of Taylor Kelly, John Beck and Adam Dedeaux, at times sharing the same training group with the likes of future Alabama QB Bryce Young, future Ohio State QB C.J. Stroud and highly-recruited prospect Miller Moss, who would also eventually commit to USC in the 2021 recruiting class.

"They're all flinging the ball around and they're like, 'Hey, who's talking to you?' 'Nobody.' They're like, 'What?' So Taylor and John, they're just like, 'Listen, all you have to do is have a season and everything will be fine,'" Brandon Dart recalls. "... Well, then it's like, we don't know if we're going to have a season."

Dart and his family knew he had to take control of his recruitment, and so he transferred to state power Corner Canyon HS in Draper, Utah, for his senior year, but the peak of the pandemic had put high school football in jeopardy across the state.

"It was stressful," his mother Kara Dart says plainly.

"Kids would come up to me and they're like, 'Where you going?' 'Well ... I might go grayshirt at BYU,'" Dart recalls.

The family can all laugh at the comment now, sitting in their living room in Kaysville, Utah, back in early January just before Dart moved to USC. In just a matter of months everything had changed and that stress had long since dissipated, the reality of the situation last summer becoming harder to believe with each successive month as Dart became the focus of one of the most high-profile QB recruiting battles leading into the December early signing period.

In the end, he had his choice of desirable Pac-12 destinations, ultimately choosing USC over UCLA, while Arizona State and Utah had also tried to land him.

As Dart summed it up a couple weeks after signing his National Letter of Intent, "[Last] May we were driving around USC and UCLA and were like, 'How cool would it be if they decided to take a chance on me' or something like that. And now several months later I'm living that."

USC didn't take a chance on Dart -- the Trojans gambled their entire 2021 quarterback recruiting picture on him in a bold gambit that would ultimately send long-time QB commit Jake Garcia to Miami instead, while underscoring just how much the coaches wanted Dart.

The same QB who was DM'ing any college coach he could find on Twitter and trying to get the attention of the likes of FCS-level Weber State this time last year, now heads into the start of USC fall camp on Friday continuing his competition with Moss for the backup job and the chance to step into one of college football's most storied quarterback lineages a year from now with starter Kedon Slovis projected to be the Trojans' next highly-drafted NFL QB in the spring.

It's what makes his story so notable among the many recruiting-related pandemic what-ifs, and there's so much more to it as the Dart family spends more than two hours back in early January recounting all the twists and turns along the way.

It's probably best to start from the beginning.

As is the case with most athletes who make it to this level, Dart's family knew early that he was a little different athletically than the other kids.

"We knew he could throw. Early on when he was little, little, one of his first words was 'Ball,'" Kara Dart says.

"That was my first word," Jaxson clarifies.

Brandon Dart had played football at Utah from 1996-2000, as a safety. Kara was an athlete as well with a background in track and field, including the long jump and javelin.

Brandon Dart didn't want to coach Jaxson, at least not right away. He wanted to watch and support, but when Jaxson was 8 years old the designated coach of his youth team never showed up, so Brandon and a few other parents took the reins out of necessity.

"I never thought in a million years that Jaxson would be a quarterback, so we tried like three or four or five kids at quarterback and it was a disaster. So I was just like, 'Let's just throw Jaxson in to see how he handles things,'" Brandon recalls.

"Everything was just so easy for him. The basics he already had. I don't know if it was because we watched a ton of sports and he was just familiar and around it so much. ... We went full spread from the get-go. I was just like, we're going shotgun. That first game that we played, Jax was just able, it was just easy. I didn't know for sure, but I told [Kara], 'Hey, I think he's going to be really, really good.'"

With that in mind, the family invested fully in Dart's athletic pursuits in baseball, basketball and football. When he wasn't in school, his father would take him on out-of-state business trips and line up coaching sessions with local trainers for Jaxson while he was working.

"I just figured eventually one of those sports would really start to elevate and show where he was best at," Brandon Dart says. "... And he never told me no. It would be like, 'Hey bud, we're going to go to this state and you're going to go train with this guy,' and he's like, 'OK'."

Basketball faded first and the pandemic derailed his junior baseball season, essentially moving his full focus to football, but that sport had already been the driving force in some big life decisions.

In Utah, ninth-graders attend junior high school -- not high school -- and football-wise most kids that age play in city/club leagues. But Dart and his family decided to have him try out for a high school team and not the local one, but rather at Roy HS 20 minutes away and in a much different setting than the affluent suburb the rest of the kids in his hometown would attend high school. Brandon Dart simply felt Roy head coach Fred Fernandes, who is well renowned in the state, was more equipped to develop his son as a football player than the local schools could offer.

"Everybody around us, our neighbors thought we were crazy. I guess we're a little crazy. We were seeing the big picture," Kara Dart says

For that ninth-grade year, though, Dart would attend his local junior high and then make the commute after school (taking an online math class to help the schedules align). His parents thought he might be able to compete with the sophomore team, but after watching Dart practice Fernandes had other plans -- he wanted him to start for the varsity right away.

"He told me straight up, 'I've never coached a quarterback like Jaxson.' Just the innate things, just the processing. ... That was just another kind of reinforcing that he might have a chance to do something," Brandon Dart says.

That's not to say Dart's parents were all that keen on the 14-year-old going up against defenders three years older than him.

"I remember I had a car ride with my dad and my dad was like, 'Are you sure you want to start right now?' And I was like, 'Yeah. I want to start right now,'" Dart says.

Says Brandon Dart: "There were games I thought, 'Yeah, he's not going to last this game. He's going to get murdered.' We played some really good teams and he would just get annihilated and then just get right back up, just get hammered and then just get right back up. ... He's like, all right, this is part of the gig. I'm going to be here every single play, I'm going to keep getting up and keep getting better, and then as the season kind of wore on there were games where he was the best player on the whole entire field."

Fernandes had played at Roy HS with former BYU and NFL QB Jim McMahon, a local legend who was still revered by the community all these decades later.

As the story goes, McMahon had told Fernandes if there was ever a QB worth it, they could bring his No. 9 jersey out of retirement. As Dart's family tells it, Fernandes decided Dart was that QB and got approval from McMahon's family to offer him the hallowed number.

"Freddy approached Jaxson and said, 'I think you're the dude. [No.] 9, what do you think, let's bring it out of retirement,'" Kara Dart recalls.

Dart and his family decided that it wasn't the right time at such a young age to wear a number that meant so much to the local community.

After his sophomore season, when Dart helped lead a Roy team that had one player with a D1 scholarship offer (to Idaho) past Timpview HS and into the 5A state semifinals, Fernandes raised the No. 9 matter again, telling Dart to take the jersey home and think about it.

Again, Dart declined, keeping his No. 7 and telling his parents he wanted to carve out his own path.

Ultimately, that path reached a dead end at Roy, though, and after his junior year the family knew if he was going to draw the kind of scholarship offers he dreamed of, he'd need a better spotlight. Fernandes was supportive.

"Roy, everything we loved about it, they just didn't have a lot of high-end talent. ... We kind of knew that if he really wanted to pursue a college career he was going to have to go to a program that kind of showcased his abilities," Brandon Dart says.

They targeted Corner Canyon HS, which had won the 2019 Utah 6A state championship. The school was 45 minutes from home and attaining eligibility required a legal transfer of guardianship of Dart to Kara's sister, who lived near the high school in Draper, Utah. It was a three-month process to get all that sorted out and a substantial sacrifice for the family.

It would also mean a lot more pressure and expectations on Dart, but he had always embraced those kind of challenges.

"Even when he was young, going to a big game, like driving to the game, he was just like, 'Dad, I love everything there is about being a quarterback. I love it,'" Brandon Dart says. "He just loves being the head of the operation, he loves the pressure. I don't even think he feels like pressure is pressure -- it's just a great part of being the quarterback. The ball's in your hand every play and you're the one making decisions and winning or losing games. ... Those are the moments he just thrives in."

That attribute would prove pivotally important to his future early in that senior season.

Again, to paint the picture perfectly clear as to where Dart's recruitment stood this time a year ago, prior to his season at Corner Canyon, just let he and his family continue telling the story.

"I was trying my very best, trying to just get in touch with Weber State. What are they? FCS?” Dart recalls. "I would just go through Twitter, I'd pull up kids who had offers, I would follow the coaches that they would tag when they would post an offer. ... So I would just send [my film] to anybody, special teams coordinators, all that stuff. And I would just get left unread, left unread. I would like send it to Weber State and they were like, 'Your third clip was sweet' and that's all they'd say.'"

Brandon Dart was compiling clips from Jaxson's training sessions with 3DQB in California to provide recent footage and to show that he was a more dynamic QB than he was able to showcase at Roy HS. (Once the family felt Dart had maxed out what he could learn from local QB trainers, they started making the regular treks to California about two and a half years ago.)

"It was really right before the season, it was our last session in July, we were going down and he's talking to their offensive coordinator -- Weber State's -- and they're like 'It's either going to be you or Creyton Cooper (a QB from Lehi, Utah, rated a 3-star by another service but unrated by Rivals, who would ultimately commit to Weber State). ... [Jaxson] was like, 'Well maybe I'll have to grayshirt at BYU or something,'" Brandon Dart recalls.

Arizona State had started talking to Dart, but initially the conversation was about having him blueshirt, which is a way programs get around the scholarship cap on a particular class. A blueshirt can be put on scholarship once they arrive on campus, provided they don't play that year and weren't "recruited," as in no official visit, no in-person off-campus contact with coaches, no National Letter or Intent, etc., allowing them to count toward the following year's scholarship cap. Needless to say, that wasn't an overly appealing option either.

For a while, Dart thought Colorado might be interested before that fizzled.

"They were worried about a mission and I told him I'm not going on a mission. ... One of my last texts to the OC at Colorado, [he said], 'We're having one more recruiting meeting' and he said, 'I think things are going to work out.' And then I didn't hear from him for two weeks," Dart recalls.

The family had lined up an ambitious spring schedule for Dart to attend recruiting camps and showcases everywhere from California to Texas to try to make up for lost time and get him on the radar, but those would all be cancelled by the pandemic.

So everything was riding on his senior season ... if there was going to be a senior season.

It was just weeks before the first game that Utah schools got the green light to proceed. Dart played well in the first couple games, but not much had changed regarding his recruitment, aside from a new Utah State offer.

Then came Week 3, Aug. 28 -- Corner Canyon vs. fellow state power Bingham ... on ESPN.

This was Dart's opportunity, as college recruiters from around the country would be watching the game on television and taking notes. Suddenly, he started to receive some preliminary DM's over Twitter.

"A lot of the schools that reached out and told me they were going to watch me, I hadn't talked to them before. That was the text -- 'We're in our meeting room right now, our whole coaching staff is watching your game, Good luck,'" Dart recalls.

He admits he felt some "butterflies" during the opening offensive series, but settled in after that. In the stands, it was a much different story.

"I thought Brandon was going to have a heart attack. That's a lot of pressure," Kara says.

According to MaxPreps, Dart completed 16 of 23 passes for 279 yards, 6 touchdowns and 0 interceptions while also rushing 11 times for 132 yards in leading Corner Canyon to a 42-20 win.

"After the ESPN game I was like, 'Hey man, your life's about to change.' You just knew,'" Brandon Dart says, looking back on that moment.

And he was right.

The next morning, Dart woke up at his aunt's house, where he stayed during the week before coming home for the weekend after Saturday morning film sessions, to a slew of Twitter notifications. At first he thought it was just retweets and comments to posts from the Corner Canyon HS account, before quickly realizing that everything he had been working toward had suddenly come to fruition overnight.

"I woke up and I had all these DMs from coaches and I was like, 'What the heck? Seriously, this is all that it took?'" Dart recalls. "... I start clicking on it and it was just coaches. That was nuts. I called my parents like, 'This is crazy. I have all these people that want to call me.' I was literally just on the phone all day."

Says Kara Dart: "I think over that weekend you probably talked to, how many coaches do you think?"

"Something crazy," Jaxson says.

"Like 17," Brandon says.

Dart was no longer a secret.

That Monday, Utah -- the local Pac-12 program a half hour or so away in Salt Lake City -- showed interest in the legacy prospect in its own backyard for the first time.

"Kyle Whittingham was my coach for six years, my position coach at the U, so we're really, really familiar," Brandon Dart says. "His dad was the guy who recruited me to Utah, he went to our wedding, he knew who Jaxson was. But I never wanted to be the helicopter dad pushing my [son] -- let him earn it. I never made a phone call, never made anything."

Adds Kara: "Brandon was like, 'That's not how I work. I don't want a program to want my kid because it's a favor. That's not going to help Jaxson. They've got to want Jaxson because he's their guy.'"

On that Monday morning Brandon Dart's phone rang with a number he recognized.

"I just don't think they really believed Jaxson was that good. I didn't hear from Kyle until they offered him. They offered him Monday after the ESPN game. I'm pulling in, I see 'Coach Whit' on my phone and I'm like, huh," he recalls.

The Utes also already had a four-star QB prospect Peter Costelli committed since that previous April. Whittingham wanted to give Dart a silent offer, the family says, and that didn't resonate well with them. Also, the QB already had formed a preliminary opinion about the local program.

"I think the biggest thing that turned me off, at my old school when I was at Roy, I would probably get like a visit from them a month. One of their coaches would come to our school and sit down and talk with us, and a lot of the times it was really never -- they didn't really seem like they were interested, they were just talking to some of our kids to give them PWOs (preferred walk-on offers)," Dart says. "It never got serious. And like my dad said, I never really felt like they had any interest in me or didn't ever believe in me."

Meanwhile, a number of other dominoes were ready to fall in Dart's favor.

"I called my head coach to tell him what happened. At that time, I was still talking to Arizona State a lot. My coach called ASU and was like, 'Hey, if you guys don't offer him he's just going to to go Utah.' So the day after that Arizona State offered. And then it was [later that week] I got Iowa State, TCU, and then things just went up from there," Dart says.

"It was a dream come true. But honestly, when I was looking at them, I was like, this is really cool, but I still didn't really have that feeling of 'This is the place where I need to be.'"

As he recalls, it was a couple weeks later when UCLA and later USC followed with offers -- the ones he had envisioned as hypothetical what-ifs while driving around Los Angeles that previous spring.

Unlike Utah with the silent offer, the Trojans made their push for Dart out in the open -- and it was bold.

USC badly needed to sign two quarterbacks in that 2021 recruiting class as Slovis and former walk-on Mo Hasan were the only QBs expected to return this year. The Trojans had impressively met that challenge, landing commitments from both Garcia and then Moss -- both ranked among the top 7 pro-style QBs in the country.

But the coaching staff decided it couldn't sit idly and watch Dart land somewhere else in the conference. They wanted him -- no matter what fallout came from publicly pursuing a third QB late in the recruiting cycle.

"Shocked," Dart recalls of his reaction to that USC offer. "I just thought it was going to be a normal call, and then coach [Clay] Helton kind of starts telling me stories about what he saw in Sam Darnold with Sam only starting his senior year in HS, and he started talking about similarities and the things that he's seen in my game and the feeling that he has when he watches me play. And he's just like, 'You're the dude that I want.'

"He's like, 'I know that we have two other kids committed right now, but I'm willing to take that risk.' And he just said, 'We're all in for you.'"

USC offensive coordinator Graham Harrell laughs at the question when asked about the decision to suddenly add significant suspense into the 2021 quarterback recruiting equation, rather than sit pat with two four-star QBs committed just two months before the early signing period.

"The suspense part's not real fun," he said with a chuckle. "Like everyone thinks that's a fun process, but when you're on this end of it the suspense part isn't real fun. He was just a guy that we thought was worth it, to be honest with you. Especially with Jake going down to Georgia, getting so far away from us, we knew that was going to be tougher to hold onto him down there. With the numbers in the room we knew we had to sign at least two. Obviously if you sign three, you sign three and you really get some depth.

"But when you watch [Dart's] tape, at the end of the day we just said he's worth it. It would be hard to argue that he wasn't the best guy playing this year maybe in the entire country."

There would be corroborating support for that notion when Dart was named the Gatorade National Football Player of the Year in May, on top of a host of other accolades he accumulated after setting Utah state records with 67 touchdown passes (plus 12 rushing TDs) and 5,886 total offensive yards (4,691 passing, 1,195 rushing) while leading Corner Canyon to a 14-0 record and the Utah Class 6A state championship.

Garcia, meanwhile, had gone to play his senior season in Georgia, with California not allowing high school football in the fall, and rumors had been mounting about a potential flip to Miami. The Dart offer likely pushed that over the edge as Garcia would eventually flip to the Hurricanes in December, before Dart had made a final decision.

USC had actually been talking to Dart for about a month or so, though, before they extended the offer during the second week of October.

Then-offensive analyst and now Trojans tight ends coach Seth Doege, who works closely with Harrell on QB recruiting, had sent Dart a DM saying they were keeping tabs on him. A few weeks after that ESPN game, Dart got on the phone with Harrell, Doege and former assistant coach John David Baker (now the TEs coach at Ole Miss) on back-to-back days.

On the third call, the offer was extended.

"It was a shock to me too. When [Corner Canyon coach Eric] Kjar called me, he was like, 'Hey, USC's offering.' I was like, 'Seriously? Why? They already have two dudes,'" Brandon Dart recalls. "... There's got to be a bear in the bushes that we're not aware of that we need to see. I didn't think USC would ever ... even after the offer, I was like, yeah, that's just one of those nice things to have."

That's not how the Trojans were viewing it, though. After a lot of thought, the USC staff was now sure it wanted to move forward in pursuit of Dart no matter the collateral cost.

"We started watching him over the summer. Doege saw some of his junior tape and he's like, 'Man, you need to watch this guy.' I didn't listen to him that much, but as we kind of got going I started watching a little bit of his junior tape and 'Man, it is really good.' And then his senior tape just -- not that his junior tape wasn't good because his junior tape was really good -- and then his senior tape was unbelievable," Harrell said. "At the end of the day we just said he's worth it, and we understand it may cost us some things.

"The great thing about Miller the whole time, he said, 'Coach, I don't care who you sign, I'm a Trojan -- I'll compete with anyone.' That's the kind of guy you want. We felt really strong that regardless of what happens we're going to get a great quarterback in Miller, and it was a deal where we knew we had to sign multiple quarterbacks because of the numbers in the room. Like I said, at the end of the day we just felt like Jaxson was worth it."

If they could land him ...

Because of the early conversations, Arizona State had long been at the forefront of Dart's considerations, but ultimately, as the fall unfolded he wasn't sold on the Sun Devils' offensive scheme and they faded from the picture.

It would be a race between USC and UCLA -- and a tight one at that.

"There was like a month where it was really bugging me because I didn't know what I was going to do," Dart says.

Adds his mother: "You were going crazy."

Brandon Dart says that once it got down to two schools, he didn't want to influence Jaxson's decision. He didn't want to be responsible for steering him in a direction if it didn't pan out. The QB would have to make the read and call on his own.

"I knew what the safest place was (UCLA), but 'SC just has a different ring to it and I think they have the highest ceiling," Brandon Dart says, recalling those discussions. "... UCLA or even ASU, those would have been really comfortable places to go, but I don't think you really get very far with comfortable situations."

Adds Kara Dart: "As a mom it was hard to watch because it was almost like his gut was telling him 'SC -- there was something about it. But a couple of the other schools, they were putting the full-court press on him and there are things about those schools that are great. ... But no matter what throughout that process he couldn't shake the gut. You do your homework and probably more analyzing than you need to, but that was it. It was like, 'Mom, this is what my gut says.'"

Dart had very quickly formed a close bond with Harrell, Doege and Baker at the time. He felt their background and upbringing in West Texas was similar to his in Utah. They shared the same hobbies, and the USC coaches were young enough to relate to him in a way other college coaches didn’t. There was a comfort level from the start.

They just had to make sure they were totally comfortable with the situation -- a situation that until late in the process still involved considering a school with two four-star QB commits, as Garcia didn't decommit from USC until Dec. 3.

Having dealt with a number of head coaches through the recruiting process by this point, Brandon Dart really appreciated Helton's style.

"We'd go from Chip Kelly to Herm Edwards to Coach Helton, and I don't know around these parts if there's any more experienced coaches than those three individuals, and I would say that Helton is as impressive or more impressive than the other two just having conversation. He has good perspective," Brandon Dart says.

He had asked Helton on their first Zoom call why USC wanted to recruit a third quarterback, and Helton told him then that he just kept watching Dart's highlights over and over and over and couldn't accept seeing him commit elsewhere in the conference without at least trying for him.

But as the process got to its final stages, Brandon Dart wanted to cut through all the recruiting talk and assure himself that he wasn't letting his son make a bad decision, so he called up Doege.

"Doege had such a good relationship with Jaxson, I felt like I could talk to Doege more. I said, 'Listen, my grandpa always told me if I can't do a deal with somebody with a handshake then they're not worth doing a deal with, and I feel like you being from where you're from, and I'm where I'm from, that we can do a handshake on this and just be completely up front and honest,'" Brandon Dart says, recounting that conversation. "I'm like, 'I don't need the recruiting BS anymore.' I basically said, 'We're down to you and UCLA. That's what we're down to, and I've got to figure out how to direct my son or approve my son making a choice.'

"Because I knew that's where Jaxson wanted to go was USC, even though he wasn't like telling me. I knew that's where he wanted to go. ... I just said, 'You've got to tell me what you really think about Jaxson, truly as a player.' I said, 'Because as a dad, I can't make a mistake here. If there's a place that he shouldn't go, then I need to be able to tell him 'Let's not do this, let's go a different direction.' So we just pounded it out. ...

"After that call, I had that peace of mind."

So too did Jaxson.

"It was either Saturday or Sunday before signing day, I had a call with Coach Helton, asked him some questions and we were pretty straightforward with each other and I just felt it was the right decision," Dart says.

The USC coaches haven't made any public decisions about the backup quarterback job, and Dart and Moss will continue to compete throughout August to jockey for position not only for the No. 2 job this season but the inside track to succeed Slovis when he moves on to the NFL.

Helton kept his comments pretty down the middle last week at Pac-12 Media Day when asked about that competition.

"You use those 25 practices to see where you're best at in the moment. ... It's about where you are in the moment," he said. "I thought Kedon had a tremendous sense of urgency to be great [as a freshman]. I see that from Miller and Jaxson in this time period. How they treated the process in spring training. In the summer how they've led our groups when Kedon has had obligations. They've run a couple of the player-run practices, which has been a great experience for them. But it takes 25 practices to evaluate. That evaluation isn't over as you go through the season. Those guys will be battling for a while."

In a way, they already have been.

While Dart was working toward a college decision, he was making his regular trips to California to work out with the 3DQB guys and often training right alongside Moss. In fact, they were right next to each other in the same group in the session right after Dart made his commitment.

"The first session, it was probably a little bit awkward for them both, but I talked to them both at the exact same time -- this is what it's going to be like the rest of your career," Taylor Kelly, the QB coach who worked with both at 3DQB, said back before the spring. "... You're going to make each other better so learn off each other. That's one thing I see is they're both competing, they're talking and working, but they're also competing against each other. It's going to be fun to watch them."

Kelly said his area of emphasis with both quarterbacks over the years was kind of the opposite. Moss' mechanics and accuracy in the pocket were already elite, but Kelly wanted to work on his athleticism and ability to make things happen out of the pocket and off-platform. For Dart, his able to create on the move is one of the attributes that sets him apart, while Kelly wanted to really hone in on his pocket mechanics.

"A lot of it was just being repeatable in the pocket. Once crap hits the fan in the pocket, somebody missed a block or they did an unbelievable job on the defensive side of making a play, his talent and ability to escape and extend a play, that was just him and who he was and his athletic ability to make any throw off-platform," Kelly said. "A lot of what we worked was just trying to be more consistent in the pocket when it is clean, or when you have to wait on a throw for a second window, learning how to touch it or drive it, getting all these random looks -- bunch of randomness training."

Dart looked sharp in all phases in the spring -- from leading a touchdown drive in the spring game inside the Coliseum (offsetting an interception) to looking like a dynamic red zone weapon with his dual-threat abilities -- and those added dimensions to Dart's game are what popped on film to the USC staff back during that evaluation period.

"He has a special skill set, the ball jumps out of his hands, he's pretty athletic, he can run, he can do some things with his feet that would be unique and different," Harrell said back before the spring. "So that adds a whole new element to things when you've got a guy that can do that, and he's big enough and durable enough to -- obviously you don't want him to take a ton of hits, but he's big enough and durable enough to take a couple hits. So he just brings a totally different element to the game."

USC gambled on Dart. Dart had no choice but to gamble on himself last fall. And so far all those bets have paid off big.

His was one of the more unique recruiting stories of the 2021 cycle, and worth at least keeping in mind as fans scrutinize where USC's recruiting picture stands entering August of this year. A lot can change in a matter of months.

In Dart's case -- from off the radar almost entirely this time a year ago, not even holding a Rivals rating as of last August, to a high four-star prospect ranked just outside the top 100 in the country. From being pressured to commit to Louisiana, trying to initiate contact with the likes of Weber State and having to think about grayshirt options, to thriving in the spotlight of a program that produces NFL quarterbacks like no other.

It's a story that will remain oft-recited context to everything else Dart accomplishes moving forward, just like Slovis' rise from unheralded 3-star prospect out of Arizona to potential first-round draft pick.

While no such acknowledgement was made by the coaching staff in the spring, the consensus among the reporters who got to watch 10 of those 15 practices is that Dart came out with the early lead in that battle for the No. 2 job ... and beyond.

He'll have to sustain that through August and into the future, but again, that's the situation he sought out in choosing the Trojans.

As his father says, summing up the mindset that has guided his son through all those twists and turns and to this moment, "It's like USC, well that's the place I want to go because those are the situations I want to be in."

Fast forward to this weekend, and Dart was back home in Utah for a couple days on a final return before locking in for the long haul of camp and the season. The Darts had some family friends over and got to talking and putting in perspective how much has changed in a year.

"It seems like it was a lifetime ago," Brandon Dart said over the phone Sunday night.

It was a winding path from Utah to USC, without a clear destination for a long while, but now it's hard to imagine any other outcome.

"Now that he's been there for seven months or something like that ... I think he just has as much confidence as he can going into fall that not only is this the right place for him but also he feels being around the guys and the continuity between everybody and how well they get along that they can exceed expectations this year to take that first step," Brandon Dart said. "And then he can fight that battle for the starting job."