BIRMINGHAM, Ala. — Mike Hartline didn’t have to come to the bowl game.For all intents and purposes, his football career at Kentucky was over the day he was nailed with a one-game suspension for the BBVA Compass Bowl. Hartline can’t practice with the team and won’t be in uniform Saturday.And yet, there Hartline was Thursday at Kentucky’s final full day of football practice in Birmingham, Ala. As Morgan Newton was being groomed Thursday for the starting job in what would have been Hartline’s final collegiate game, Hartline walked the sidelines and the field with playbook in hand.”He’s handled it well, as well as he could for a guy missing his last game with as much as he went through with this program” head coach Joker Phillips said.Dressed in a Kentucky street clothes, Hartline pointed out things to the quarterbacks and talked up his teammates. In the Cats’ honored “last tackle” tradition, where the seniors get to make their last tackle in practice, Hartline was the final player to run through the line and tackle a tackling dummy.He also broke down the team in the final huddle of practice.”We feel like he is part of us again since he is here with us,” senior tailback Derrick Locke said. “We have to win for him.”Junior wide receiver Randall Cobb, a close friend of Hartline’s who has been through plenty of battles with Hartline and even took the starting quarterback job from him two years ago, said he took the initial suspension of Hartline hard.”We wanted him down here, we wanted him to be a part of it and he wanted to be a part of it,” Cobb said. “That shows how much he cares about this team.”

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