**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.**
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.
