Kevin Willis

WKU head football coach Willie Taggart is leaving the school to become the coach at the University of South Florida. Taggart is a Florida native who has been an ace Sunshine State recruiter for the Hilltoppers.

Taggart broke the news to his players after Friday's practice, and then boarded a plane that night for Florida.

At a Saturday morning news conference athletic director Todd Stewart said he, like everyone, had been hearing rumors for weeks about Taggert's future and said he really wasn't surprised given what he called the current landscape of college football.

"I was optimistic that he would stay here because of the financial package we could offer him and because, as he has frequently said, WKU is in his DNA," Stewart said, "After more than doubling his salary a year ago, we were prepared to offer him a much better contract than he even had this year but there are some ties to Florida that obviously weight heavily into the situation."

Hilltopper's tight end, senior Jack Doyle, said the team was initially shocked at the news but Stewart spoke to the players early Saturday morning.

"One thing he said was 'Life is 10% what happens to you and 90% how you react,'" Doyle said. "So it's up to these seniors to get this team right and get them to react the right way. We've been through so much as seniors the past 4-5 years here so there's nothing that can really divide us now."

WKU defensive coordinator Lance Guidry was named interim head coach while the search for a permanent head coach is underway.

WKU will play Dec. 26 in the Little Caesar's Bowl vs. Central Michigan. The Toppers went 7-5 on the season, including wins against Kentucky, Southern Mississippi, and Sun Belt Conference champ Arkansas State.

Taggert had been earning a base salary of $425,000 a year at WKU. South Florida paid their last head coach $2 million annually. Taggert must pay WKU a $500,000 buyout.

WKU Public Radio has confirmed that Art Ealum has been chosen to be Owensboro's next Police Chief. The decision was made Tuesday afternoon by the Owensboro City Commission.

Nearly 150 patients exposed to potentially contaminated steroid injections in Tennessee were given medicine that was well past the normal shelf life. The Tennessean reports some of the medicine was more than seven weeks old, well past the industry standard of 24 hours.

More than half of Kentucky's public high school students last year were not prepared for college or careers based on the results of an assessment released Friday. Despite that alarming finding, Education Commissioner Terry Holliday said the results showing that 47 percent of high schoolers are ready to advance are a significant improvement over the previous year's 38 percent.

Western Kentucky University's Glasgow campus will hold a memorial service Thursday afternoon for a student who died last week. The service for Trina M. Lawson, 36, will be at 2 p.m. in the WKU-Glasgow library. The campus is also collecting donations for her family.