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The original was posted on /r/cfb by /u/The_H2O_Boy on 2023-12-28 17:49:37.

The USC team most college football fans expected to see all season showed up at the DirecTV Holiday Bowl in San Diego on Wednesday night.

Miller Moss and the USC Trojans overwhelmed Louisville’s pass defense and the Trojans defense made enough key stops for Lincoln Rley’s team to walk off at Petco Park with a 42 – 28 victory over # 15th ranked Louisville before the 35,317 fans in attendance at Petco Park, home of the MLB’s San Diego Padres.

This was the way the USC season was supposed to go according to pre-season expectations. Their QB throwing for records, their WR’s running all over the field, and their defense finding the stops when they had to. However, this wasn’t Caleb Williams and Brenden Rice, this was backup QB Miller Moss and WR’s Tahj Washington and Ja’Kobi Lane.

The game actually started off like the back half of USC’s regular season. On offense to start the game a 3 and out. Followed by Louisville’s QB Jack Plummer leading his team on a 10 play, 71 yard TD drive on their first possession. USC’s next possession ended with a dropped ball on a 3rd down play and a missed FG and the game started to have the feel of many of the Trojans late regular season 2023 games. However, the defense on the very next play recovered a fumble in the red zone and that’s when Moss went to work. 3 plays later he would connect on his first of SIX TD passes, and he was off and on his way to passing for 372 yards, having entered the game with a career total of 542 passing yards.

Moss is in his 3rd season as part of the USC program and made his starting debut at QB in the Holiday Bowl. He is a local L.A. area resident who grew up a fan of USC’s as a kid and it seemed like he had been waiting a lifetime for this moment and was absolutely going to shine. Before the 1st half was over, he had tied the Holiday Bowl record of 4 TD passes as the Trojans had a 28-14 halftime lead. A combination of some excellent throws and great YAC plays by Washington gave USC fans a lot to cheer for, instead of them yearning for Caleb Williams.

On the other side of the ball, Louisville QB Jack Plummer completed 21 of 25 passes, but for only 141 yards and running back Isaac Guerendo had 23 rushes for 161 yards, as they did a solid job of taking what the USC defense was giving them. However, the USC defense was only giving up the underneath stuff, which allowed Louisville to score exactly 1 TD in each quarter, but the Trojans defense had 3 timely sacks and 2 timely turnovers to hold Louisville to 28 total points in the game.

Any doubt that this was Miller Moss’s game was but to rest early in the 2nd half. After an interception in the endzone and a Cardinals score, Moss lead his team on a 12 play TD drive, that featured multiple 3rd and long conversions and was capped by his 5th TD pass of the game. Exactly 5 minutes into the 4th quarter Moss would throw his 6th TD pass, a 44 yard TD to Duce Robinson and that gave us our final score of 42-28.

After the game, and after a eggnog bath, Coach Riley said about Moss, “I’m not a bit surprised with how he played … he was awesome” When asked is Moss is the 2024 starting QB for USC Riley didn’t fully commit to a ’24 starting QB but did state, “he may have scared off anybody that wanted to come here”.

This was USC’s first bowl win since the Rose Bowl following the 2016 season.

Louisville started this year 10-1 but finished on a 3 game losing streak.

Moss’s 6 TD passes is a USC bowl game record, a Holiday Bowl game record, and ties the PAC-12 all time bowl game record.