Since he was a boy, Trent Mosley was taught to live by the Five Ps: Proper preparation prevents poor performance.
The Five Ps weren’t so much a lesson in the Mosley household as “a lifestyle,” father Emmett Mosley explains. He can’t recall when or from whom he first heard the phrase, but ever since, the Five Ps have stuck with him. To the point that he and his wife, Cindy, made it a core tenet of their family. All four Mosley kids — their daughter, Jalyn, and three boys, Emmett Jr., Trent and Grant — were brought up on the principle that preparation was paramount.
So then, no one in the Mosley family was surprised to see Trent sprinting wide open in the second quarter last Friday night at the Coliseum, well on his way to another impressive performance in his second college game. Just like no one at USC is batting an eye at the freshman’s staggering start, which has him leading the nation with three touchdown catches and the Big Ten with 222 receiving yards.
To those who know Trent best, it’s like this sudden ascent to stardom simply was … inevitable. That’s the Five Ps at work, his father explains.
“That doesn’t just happen by chance,” Emmett says. “He prepared for that.”
The preparation for this moment dates back about a dozen years, to when Emmett decided to first watch football film with his boys. They weren’t much older than 7 when they started — already obsessed with sports, but still short on attention span. So their father taught them in short spurts — 20 minutes maximum, he says — and bribed them with pizza and Capri-Suns.
“You had to have snacks,” Emmett says. “No snacks, and it was a no-go.”
The five Ps went beyond football. It meant making your bed every morning and putting finished homework in your backpack every night. It meant staying patient, putting in the work and trusting the process. It meant preparing yourself for any possible outcome and keeping a level head, regardless of what happens.
But sports were such a ubiquitous part of their lives that, naturally, they became a canvas for conveying those lessons. Emmett and Cindy were college athletes at Notre Dame, where he played football and she won the women’s soccer equivalent of the Heisman Trophy. So when their kids were young — and all brimming with natural talent — they encouraged them to try every sport under the sun and kept them from sticking with one year-round, like so many of their peers.
“It was important for us to expose them to as many different things as we could,” Cindy says.
So Trent dabbled in football, basketball, soccer and lacrosse. He wrestled. He ran track. He could hit a baseball, even though he never played competitively. When his parents would ask him his favorite sport at a young age, Cindy says, “He’d say hockey!”
They made it a point not to pressure their kids to specialize. But all three boys eventually focused on football. Emmett Jr., the oldest, is a receiver at Texas. Grant, the youngest, is a three-star receiver prospect at Santa Margarita High with offers from the likes of USC and Oregon.
Trent, like the other two, showed natural talent early. Not that Emmett or Cindy allowed any of their kids to dwell on it.
“We always wanted them to know there’s always somebody out there better, always someone bigger, always stronger, always faster,” Emmett said. “You’ve always gotta continue to compete and get better.”
The family moved from the Chicago area to Southern California when Trent was in the seventh grade, just as the pandemic shut down schools in the area. So his parents decided to hold Trent back a year, knowing that an extra year of preparation would help him hit the ground running.
Football, Emmett says, was not front of mind when they made that decision.
“Sports just ended up being, you know, a cherry on the sundae,” he said.
When Carson Palmer got ahold of him, Trent certainly was ahead of the curve. He was entering his final season at Santa Margarita when Palmer was hired as head coach, and right away, the former Heisman-winning quarterback from USC could sense there was something different about his star receiver.
Not only was Mosley finishing first in every wind sprint, but whenever Palmer added another element of his offense, Mosley seemed to pick it up immediately. Faster than the coach would’ve expected any high school athlete encountering “a true pro-style, West Coast system.”
“But we just put more and more and more on his plate as we figured out, you know, how receptive he was and how smart he was,” Palmer said. “We’d install it at 2:30, practice it at 4 and he would just have it.”
At 5 feet 10, Mosley didn’t have the size that most scouts would equate with a prototypical receiver prospect, which, Palmer says, is part of why Mosley didn’t get his just due from recruiting services. But as Palmer saw it, Mosley countered his lack of ideal size with major advantages elsewhere.
Palmer compared him to former USC wideout Amon-Ra St. Brown, who also had a smaller frame but played with surprising power and explosiveness.
“He can do a lot of what all those [bigger] guys can do, but the difference is those guys can’t do a lot of the little things that he can do,” Palmer said. “People fall in love with the measurables, but it’s the immeasurables that separate Trent from everybody else.”
Before long, Palmer could move Mosley wherever they wanted to deploy him on offense — outside receiver, slot receiver, running back, even quarterback. Often they would motion Mosley from one spot to another, to confuse the defense.
He could even be a dynamite blocker when called upon. Palmer recalls one play, in the CIF semifinals against Orange Lutheran, when he put Mosley at the point of attack to block and he drove one defender into two others, “single-handedly blocking three guys.” The running back ended up scoring untouched.
During the postseason last year, the football world finally glimpsed the full complement of Mosley’s powers. In the Southern Section Division 1 final against Corona Centennial at the Rose Bowl, Palmer put the ball in Mosley’s hands on every play in the first quarter.
He scored on a deep ball, on a screen pass and on two rushing plays. He ended up catching 10 passes for 292 yards and four touchdowns in one of the best playoff performances in state history.
Two weeks later, Palmer fed him again, and Mosley didn’t disappoint. He caught 11 passes for 183 yards and three touchdowns as Santa Margarita sailed past De La Salle in the CIF Open Division state championship.
“I’m of the belief that you’ve got to get your best players the ball,” Palmer said. “And I think he was the best player in the country.”
At USC, Mosley already is making a push through two weeks to be the Trojans’ most dynamic offensive weapon as a freshman.
That he’s already 20 years old doesn’t hurt that pursuit. But Lincoln Riley, USC’s coach, points more to Mosley’s “unique” preparation as a primary reason for why he’s come on so quickly — and why we’re only just starting to see what he’s capable of.
“These are not easy skills, especially for somebody as young as he is,” Riley said. “A lot of times, guys maybe start to figure that out more toward the back end of their careers. He’s doing it right now at a young age.”
The whole world could see that as Mosley flew open in the second quarter last Friday. The play call played out just as they’d prepared.
“When we were watching the film, that was exactly what we saw,” Mosley said. “In the moment, I was like, it worked.”
But just as he’d been taught, a few days later, the Trojans’ rising star already was on to the next play.
“Honestly,” he said, “I’m just trying to make more.”
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