Kentucky football coach Rich Brooks has a good problem on his hands.
Brooks and his coaching staff will have to decide who will start at quarterback when the Wildcats take on Vanderbilt in a pivotal Southeastern Conference encounter Saturday in Nashville.

Brooks indicated Monday that he may start Mike Harline, the team’s starter until he went down with a knee injury on Oct. 10 at South Carolina. Since that time, freshman Morgan Newton has primarily been filling the void vacated by Hartline.
Quarterback controversies rarely happen during the regular season. Usually those disputes are settled in the preseason. However, this has been an exception for the Wildcats.

Hartline began the season in the pocket, but the play of Newton has been inspiring over the past month. He threw the first two touchdowns of his career Saturday in a 37-12 win over Eastern Kentucky. Those scores came after he tossed a costly interception in a 31-24 loss to Mississippi State the week before.

Since he has been thrown into the frying pan, Newton has gained knowledge and experience for the future. Although Brooks would have preferred a red shirt for Newton this season, nothing compares to experience, and Newton is getting plenty of it.
Brook said Newton has progresses steadily since taking over as the team’s starting quarterback.

"I think the Morgan Newton hat you saw Saturday was light years away from the Morgan Newton that you saw in the Auburn game,” Brooks said. “That progress has been evident in practice to us as we've gone through the last couple of weeks - particularly the last two weeks."

Brooks said the biggest difference has been Newton’s confidence level and his ability to throw the football, but added that Newton, who was named SEC Freshman of the Week Monday, has plenty of room for improvement.

"I see a guy who has always had some confidence but had trouble adjusting to the speed of the decision-making. He's always had an arm, although at times when you're going through the progress of trying to throw the ball and you're worried about getting sacked and you're trying to get the ball out sometimes it comes out of your hand funny - which it has on occasion,” he said. “But for the most part this last Saturday, because it didn't happen as fast as it would in an SEC game, is part of the reason, but you saw tight spirals, rifle shots, much better accuracy and much better decision-making. He will again learn from that game because there were maybe three or four occasions where he was locked-on totally when other times he looked, came off of it and went back to this one and a couple of times he even went to the third guy and delivered the ball well - so it's all a process. Whatever happens the rest of the year he has advanced his progression a great deal for the future. He still has a long way to go."

Brooks said Hartline also has been making progress over the past week, but didn’t say if he would be able to go full speed this weekend.
"We'll just have to judge and see,” he said. “Certainly, I'm not going to put Mike Hartline out there if he can't get out of his own way, let alone pull the ball down and run it if he has to. Having said that, he looked pretty good last week. He ran around (Sunday), it bothered him a little bit. We feel like he'll be ready to go through a full practice and we'll have to see how it goes after that (Tuesday)."