UK alum Tom Leach has been the play-by-play “Voice of the Wildcats” for the football Cats for 13 years and 10 years for men’s basketball. He is a four-time winner of the Kentucky Sportscaster of the Year award. Tom offers an entertaining and insightful perspective into UK athletics. Column entries will be posted twice per week through April. Read Tom’s full biography
= = =
Through two games, Mike Hartline has done nothing to cause any fan to question Joker Phillips’ decision about the starting quarterback position at Kentucky. The Wildcats do not yet have a turnover and the yards per attempt — a measure of a team’s ability to incorporate a vertical passing attack into its plan — is more than eight yards, on pace for the best mark since 2006.
Former UK quarterback Dusty Bonner is not surprised.
Bonner quarterbacked the Wildcats to an unexpected Music City Bowl bid in 1999. He didn’t have NFL-caliber arm strength but he was accurate, he minimized turnovers and he was a leader for his team. That sounds like a pretty good script for Hartline to follow in his senior season, and Bonner likes the way Hartline is doing the job.
“I think we saw that last year before he got hurt,” Bonner said. “I think that maybe there are some people who don’t want to see it because they don’t want him at quarterback and they will yell for somebody else. But Mike did a really nice job at the beginning of last year before he got hurt and he was really hitting his stride as a quarterback. I keep trying to remind people that last year, he was a junior in the SEC (and) quarterbacks aren’t really good until they get to their junior years because the defense is so advanced and so good.
“You get a few guys like a (Tim) Tebow that can come out as a freshman and (excel) but a true dropback quarterback, they don’t blossom until they are juniors and seniors. It is one of those things where, and this may sound crazy, but when you are in your first two years, and I remember this myself, you don’t throw to the running backs that much out of the backfield. Then, all of a sudden in my third year, it was a like a light bulb went off in my head and I started using those guys all the time. It is one of those things and repetition and soak it in for four years as a quarterback in this conference. Mike was hitting his stride in his junior season and that was when I expected him to hit it. For him to come out and play like (he has), I am not shocked by that at all.”
Bonner said the ability to make a 60- or 70-yard pass is not the key to a quarterback’s success. Bonner said Hartline just needs to make sure that he doesn’t get caught up in trying to prove anything to his doubters rather than just doing what he needs to do for this team to succeed.
“If he tries to go out there and be a Brett Favre, it is not going to work just like it wouldn’t have gone well for me to go out and be exactly like Tim (Couch) because Tim and I were different,” Bonner said. “Tim had more talent than I had and had a stronger arm and could do things I couldn’t do, so I had to make up for that by doing things I could do that he couldn’t. In this conference, in the SEC, you look at the teams that win and compete for a national title and Alabama has a quarterback that is a game manager — and that is a dirty word around here because people don’t want that — but really that is what the teams that win it all win with.”
In Hartline’s first season as a starter, his top two playmakers, Derrick Locke and Dicky Lyons, were both injured midway through the season. But now, he is blessed with an abundance of big play guys in Cobb, Locke and Chris Matthews and up-and-comers like La’Rod King and Matt Roark.
“In the last couple years, Mike has been in a tough position,” Bonner said. “If you don’t have a speed guy split left and split right that the defense respects, you are a sitting duck. Nothing against the recievers that we have had, but it takes a lot of time to get ready. You don’t go from high school and all of a sudden be a superstar. Very few people can do that, and people like Randall Cobb and Derrick Locke can do it, but they are one-in-a-million-type guys.
“You get a guy to the left and right that is fast, now defenses can’t match up with that guy. They have to play zones or double cover and do things like that and (it opens) the middle of the field up for the tight end. That is why, this year, we need a tight end to step up because defenses will have to respect those guys and put a safety or a linebacker to cover a tight end. One-on-one and at this level, a tight end should beat a safety and beat a linebacker.”
