Today’s interviewee is former Georgia and Lassiter quarterback Hutson Mason, who will be inducted into the Georgia High School Football Hall of Fame on Saturday. Fifteen years ago, Mason was the state’s first high school quarterback to pass for more than 4,000 yards or 50 touchdowns in a season and the first to demonstrate the full game-changing impact of the spread offense at the highest levels. Mason went on to become Georgia’s starting quarterback for a season and played briefly in the NFL and CFL. Mason worked as a sports commentator for ESPN and 680 The Fan before taking a corporate job with Chick-fil-A in January.
1. Take us back to 2008. Lassiter had never won a playoff game. Just finished 3-7. It hired Chip Lindsey, and the rest is history. How did it all unfold? “My sophomore year, we were not very good. We ran the option, and as you can imagine, that system didn’t fit me and what I do. The head coach at the time got fired, and Lassiter went out and hired a guy from Birmingham. The principal, Chris Shaw, had come from Alabama and knew about Hoover and the success under Rush Propst. He hired this offensive coordinator who was 32 or 33 from Hoover. I knew about Hoover because of the MTV Show ‘Two-A-Days,’ but I didn’t know Chip and what system he was bringing. He comes in and tells us, ‘Man, we’re going to air this thing out using this system that Mike Leach and Hal Mumme and the Air Raid guys invented. It’s going to be fun.’ That’s how it started.
“So we had Philip Lutzenkirchen, who played at Auburn [and the NFL as a tight end], and Camden Wentz, who was a starting offensive lineman at N.C. State. We had some nice pieces, but the best thing Chip did was recruit the high school. It was the old-school way. Now you go out and get transfers. He recruited the other athletes in the school that were lacrosse players, the baseball guys, the basketball players. We had some really good high school athletes that could help us win, and a lot of them didn’t play [before] because the team wasn’t good and the option offense wasn’t fun to them. Chip just pounded the hallways. He really sold it. And he was a players’ coach. The players wanted to come out and have fun playing football with their friends on Friday night.”
2. So down-trodden Lassiter suddenly goes 9-3 and 12-1, setting records in scoring and passing. What made the offense so hard to stop? “We had good players, but we were not the most talented team in the state. We overachieved for the talent we had. One of the reasons was our scheme and system. If you study the history of Georgia football during that time, nobody else was running what we were running. We were trailblazers in Georgia bringing in the concept of throwing 40 times a game with four and five wide receivers. It was so foreign that a lot of defenses didn’t know how to prepare for us. It was like a team that had never seen the triple option because all they’d played against was the spread. In those days, all teams were seeing was option or power I. They didn’t understand how to defend RPO’s or even know what that stood for. That was the genesis of RPO, spread offense, up-tempo. We had a package called NASCAR where we went warp-speed fast. One word repeated meant the whole formation and play. We’d say ‘China, China, China,’ and everybody knew what to do. The other team couldn’t even get lined up or get their signals in. Do I rush four? Do I drop eight in coverage? It gave us a schematic advantage, and that’s how we were able to put up such gaudy numbers. But it was more than just passing. The no-huddle was just as foreign. And mixing that in with tempo. Can you play at that speed they play with? Can you substitute? Are the players conditioned to do that? Coaches and teams didn’t know what was hitting them in the mouth.”
3. What are your most memorable games or moments of your high school career? “Five interceptions against Colquitt County to get knocked out of the playoffs [2009 quarterfinals] still sits pretty sour. I threw four interceptions my entire senior year at Georgia and threw five in one game at Lassiter. I’d say our first playoff win in school history in 2008. We played at Etowah [won 23-20 in overtime]. In 2009, there was the first region championship and undefeated regular season. As special as 2008 was, when we went 9-3, the 2009 team was a whole ‘nother level just because of the undefeated season, the records, the stats, just the attention we were getting and the amount of people we’d get to high school football games at Lassiter. It felt like Smalltown USA football. The whole town shut down. We had to bring in extra bleachers. That speaks to how much buzz there was around our team that year. People were saying ‘I want to see the numbers they’re putting up. I want to see that on Friday night.’”
[Before Mason, the state record for passing yards in a season was 3,710 set by Charlton County’s Jeremy Privett in 2003. Charlton County was Class A school. In the highest class, the record was 3,057 set by Newnan’s Tyler Horne in 2003. Mason passed for 3,705 yards as a junior, then 4,560 as a senior, shattering the state record by more than 800 yards while leading a school to its first region championship in its 28-year history. Lindsey left Lassiter after the 2009 season to join Troy’s staff. He is currently the offensive coordinator at North Carolina.]
4. How do you feel about induction? Is this your first Hall of Fame? “Yes, first Hall of Fame. Just completely honored. Where it hits home is when I look at the other names, not only this year, but the past couple of years. There’s obviously a lot of Georgia guys – Alec Ogletree, David Greene, Leonard Pope and guys like that that I know really well. Man, those are icons, legends at Georgia, but also other big-name guys, like Thomas Davis, guys I grew up watching. You never think one day you’ll be spoken about in the same realm when it comes to high school football. And then doing it in a state that’s known for great high school football makes it even more special and knowing I did it in the highest classification in Georgia at the time.”
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