Will Hutson Mason play?

A lot of discussion after Thursday's practice revolved around true freshman quarterback Hutson Mason, currently the backup to Aaron Murray. How has Mason looked so far? Will he play if something happens to Murray?

For starters, Georgia coach Mark Richt said Mason has picked up things pretty well so far.

“Not many true freshmen can jump in a huddle and call the plays and make the checks at the line of scrimmage, and do it with an amount of confidence and execution,” Richt said. “If you measure it as a true freshman, it’s (pretty good), if you measured it as a veteran, you’d say, ‘Why’d he do that?’”

I asked Richt whether they’d still try to avoid burning Hutson Mason’s redshirt.

“I don’t know what we’re gonna do yet,” Richt said. It’s just so early. I don’t know what we’re going to do yet.”

This obviously will be a developing situation. It comes down to whether – if necessary – the team wants to play Mason, who’s been getting the backup reps, and burn his redshirt, or go to Logan Gray, who isn’t getting any reps at the moment, but has the experience.

“We just wanna get him as ready as possible, and if God forbid something happened to Aaron and we had to go to a second guy, we’d have to gauge what (would be the better option),” Richt said. “I just don’t know what would be the best at this point. It would just depend on how far (Mason) progresses as we go. I hope we don’t have to worry about that.”

Meanwhile Gray is having a good camp so far by all accounts, with Richt being the latest to add to the praise.

“I’m just impressed that he’s this far along, this quickly. He seemed to catch the ball pretty well. He hasn’t been afraid to block,” Richt said. “I think there’s a definite advantage of really understanding the offensive system from the quarterback’s perspective.”

How long could Gray go not getting reps at quarterback and then go back in there?

“If it happened just midseason and there was an emergency situation, and we had to throw him in there, and he hadn’t thrown a ball, it’d probably be tough,” Richt said.