Bill Moos ’74 History
2026
Bill Moos was alone on his Special K Ranch near Spokane when he noticed a vehicle driving slowly down the lane. He scratched his “three-day beard” and “watched intently as a well-dressed black man got out of the car and walked quietly until he stood face to face with me on the porch.”
The stranger shook his hand. “I’m Elson Floyd, president of Washington State University, and I have come here today to bring you home.”
The unexpected meeting, sealed with a handshake, left Moos temporarily speechless. After a few more formal meetings in Pullman the following week, it was official. The former Coug football standout was WSU’s new athletic director.
That 2010 anecdote is one highlight in the four decades Moos spent as an athletic director at four institutions, including his alma mater. This memoir details his childhood in the wheat-field community of Edwall, his glory years playing football for WSU, and behind-the-scenes moments of his highly publicized career.
His straightforward stories will resonate with fans and critics of programs for which he worked—the University of Montana and the University of Oregon as well as WSU and Nebraska—football enthusiasts, other ADs, and Cougs.
Moos fell in love with WSU as an eight-year-old in 1959, when his parents, Parmalee (’47 Psych.) and Don Moos (’47 Animal Sci.) took him and his older sister to the homecoming football game. His father, a four-term Republican legislator, went on to lead the state departments of agriculture, fisheries, and ecology. While Moos graduated from high school in Olympia, where the family moved for his dad’s government work, he had largely grown up on a farm 35 miles southwest of Spokane. Early chapters offer an intimate look at family and farm life in the 1950s. In fact, the title comes from the waterway where Moos fished as a kid.
Moos writes of loyalty, family history, and words he lives by. Perhaps the most influential line came to him from Shakespeare via his mother, who said this to him when he was deciding whether to attend University of Washington or WSU: “This above all: To thine own self be true.”