There he goes, Jim Leavitt, the only coach that the University of South Florida football team, fans and boosters ever knew.
There he went, figuratively drenched in blood as he was fired on Friday for grabbing walk-on fullback Joel Miller by the throat and slapping him during halftime of the game against Louisville on Nov. 21.
The fact that he then proceeded to lie about it, denying he ever did such thing even as he appeared in a press conference after the game with a bloodied face, and interfered with the investigation didn't help him much either.
However, I don't think that Leavitt's firing was solely because of this incident. That was just the straw that broke the camel's back.
Some fans were calling for him to be fired before any information about player abuse surfaced. They were tired of watching their team start 5-0 or 6-0 and then completely collapse in the months of October and November. If Bobby Bowden could be fired because of lack of performance at Florida State, what makes Leavitt so special?
As a USF alum, I am grateful for the way Leavitt took on the challenge of building a football program from scratch and brought it all the way to being ranked second in the nation, but you can't just live in the past, not in today's college football landscape anyway.
Some people think that he is beyond questioning because he stayed in Tampa even though he received tempting offers from his beloved Kansas State, UCLA and Alabama. To that I say so what? Maybe he stayed because he knew he wasn't ready for the big time, not because of some misguided sense of loyalty to USF.
As far as his possible replacements go, former Auburn coach Tommy Tuberville seems to be the popular choice. He has shown he can play against the big boys and took Auburn to a 13-0 record in 2004.
I am going to think outside the box and suggest Jon Gruden. He is a currently unemployed big-name coach that has proven he can win at the highest level and has close ties to the Tampa Bay community, which loves him after he took the Bucs to a Super Bowl title in 2002.
Gruden would also bring in a lot of money from boosters, give USF national prominence and entice four and five-star recruits to play for a program on the rise.
Leavitt will get another job somewhere, maybe even as soon as this year, but it's a shame that his head coaching stint with the Bulls didn't have a better ending, hoisting up an Orange Bowl Trophy in Miami instead of an International Bowl trophy in Toronto.
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Very insightful. I, too believe his firing was just a matter of time and/or incident. The bulls grew faster than he did and was not up to the task of handling rapid success, i.e., number two ranking. He was a good "starter" coach, but at some point, USF had to take the training wheels off.
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