Hutson Mason, the Lassiter quarterback who threw for 486 yards last week, doubted he could repeat the feat Friday night. It wasn’t the wet weather.
“It was three times this bad last week, and we threw 45 times,” he said.
But this time, Lassiter was playing Wheeler, Region 6-AAAAA’s winless team, and Mason speculated that the game would basically be over by halftime, and it was.
With 4:29 left in the second quarter, Hutson had thrown his fourth touchdown pass and put up 202 yards. Lassiter led 42-7, and Hutson was done for the night.
“Some say we throw the ball all the time, but when it comes down to it, we still have to complete the pass,’’ Mason said. “If I wasn’t accurate, I wouldn’t have the numbers.’’
Mason is the quarterback with the numbers, and sometimes they are hard to fathom.
A year ago, in his first season in a new coach’s no-huddle spread offense, Mason passed for 3,705 yards. That’s the most ever for a player in the highest classification and five short of the record for all classifications. It was his first season as a starter.
Another number that is remarkable is three. That’s how many Division I-A scholarship offers he has (Western Michigan, Eastern Michigan, UAB), none with a BCS-conference school. Iowa had offered but pulled it in August, days before Mason was to commit.
It’s not grades. Mason is a good student. It’s not size. He’s 6 feet, 2-1/2 inches and 190 pounds, and his father is 6-5. The thing that could not be measured Friday night was arm strength.
Mason never threw a ball farther than 30 yards. It wasn’t part of the job this night. Instead, he tortured Wheeler with screens, shuttle passes and curl routes. He did hit one post route, a 21-yard touchdown to Cody Johnson.
“My arm strength is fine,” Hutson said. “You can ask Coach Lindsey. He’s been around the game. I can throw any route out there.”
Chip Lindsey is the coach who came from Hoover High in Alabama, the school from MTV’s “Two-A-Days.” He turned a option-veer offense into a throwing circus of four wide receivers and Mason in the shotgun formation.
“His accuracy is as good as I’ve ever been around,’’ Lindsey said. “That’s for my career.”
And Lindsey concurred. Mason’s arm strength is fine.
In some ways, Mason is lucky. He doesn’t think he would be a college prospect, or even a name that high school fans would recognize, if Lassiter hadn’t converted to the spread.
“Absolutely not,” Mason said. “It’s a miracle that Coach Lindsey is here. It’s the perfect offense for me. Throwing is what I do.”
But in other ways, he’s got an uphill battle. Quarterback is the most competitive position in the game, and even record-breakers with good size and a track record find it hard to make it into major college football.
Only 22 former Georgia high school players play quarterback at the Division I-A level. Only four start. One is T.J. Yates of North Carolina. By coincidence, Yates played at Lassiter’s next-door neighbor Pope and got a late offer to UNC after his school switched to the spread his senior season.
Mason hopes that for himself.
“It’s frustrating, but if I keep performing, something has to give,’’ Mason said. “There’s not much to say except keep going out and proving people wrong.”
Produced by Georgia High School Football Daily
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