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.”…