TAMPA, Fla. -- When University of South Florida sophomore Joel Miller pulled into the Saint Mark the Evangelist Catholic Church parking lot in New Tampa shortly after midnight on Dec. 17, he saw the other car was already there.
Jim Leavitt had already arrived for this pre-arranged meeting. The meeting was to continue the ongoing lie that Leavitt and Miller were carrying on into what really happened during halftime in the locker room of the USF-Louisville game four weeks earlier.
Leavitt, who was Miller's football coach at USF, asked him to bring all the information and provide specific details about his testimony from when Miller spoke to USF investigators about the incident earlier that day.
As Miller pulled into the parking lot, he thought how ironic it was that he was meeting outside a church – a church of all places! – to collaborate their stories.
"He told me to bring everything that happened [during Miller's Dec. 16 testimony with USF investigators] and give him everything that me and the investigators talked about and to write it all down on a piece of paper," Miller told FanHouse in an exclusive interview Thursday.
Leavitt initially told Miller to e-mail this information to his wife's e-mail account. His wife's account, of course, would not be accessible through a public records search. But instead of e-mailing the information, Miller and Leavitt met in a church parking lot for about 10 minutes.
Miller gave Leavitt a page that he had typed with all of the details and specifics of his testimony to USF's investigators.
"It was a weird feeling," said Miller about the secretive meeting.
The clandestine meeting between Leavitt and Miller was just one example of the extremes Leavitt, the only coach in USF's 13-year history, took to try and cover up the details about what happened in the locker room that, because of Leavitt's lies, ultimately cost Leavitt his job that would have paid him $9.5 million over the next five years.
Brett McMurphy reporting at FanHouse
I can't say for sure that Joel Miller is telling the truth about this, but I can say for sure that its going to be hard as hell for Jim Leavitt to disprove it.
As I said before, its way past time for him to let this go.
Sometimes there is a time to change a coach. Usually its because a coach becomes "old" like 3 day old fish and starts to become ineffective but in other situations, a coach may begin to feel invincible and not subject to the rules others need to follow. Its certainly time for Jim Leavitt to move on an learn something from this. If he keeps pushing USF, he'll never, ever get another school to hire him.
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