Tonight, while the University of South Florida plays a huge in-state football game against the Florida Gators, the USF community will wrap itself in green, and the players will carry the flag of a program that has long sought respect in our football-fanatical state.

But amid the revelry and rivalry, a shadow looms over USF Athletics. Next month, the school plans to induct Jim Leavitt — its first head football coach, the man who built the program from nothing and led it briefly to the mountaintop — into its Athletic Hall of Fame.

That induction cannot happen.

Not now. Not ever.

Leavitt was fired in 2010 for grabbing walk-on player Joel Miller by the throat and slapping him in the locker room. For years, Miller lived with the stigma of being “the kid who got his coach fired.” He strugg

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