Georgia football is fresh off their improbable 8OT win over Georgia Tech on Friday night that will go down as one of the best games of all time in this rivalry. But what if someone told you that this game never needed to go to overtime to begin with? What if there was a play in regulation that could have won Georgia this game before the wild back-and-forth overtime?
UGA scored their first points of the game early in the third quarter when Carson Beck found Oscar Delp for a two-yard touchdown. But instead of kicking the extra point, Kirby Smart decided to go for two, which ended up failing to keep the score at 17-6.
This decision did not make a lot of sense in the moment because kicking the extra point would have made it possible for UGA to then tie the game with another touchdown and field goal. But that clearly was not what Smart wanted to do.
Smart was asked about this decision in his postgame press conference, and this was his defense in making that decision.
“Yeah, interesting question. I'm not going to dig real deep in it,” Smart shared via 247sports.com. "It's analytics, and we follow them almost to a T. We're in charge of that. It ended up looking really interesting because you kick an extra point to win the game."
An extra point wins the game in regulation
It obviously would be impossible to know this in the moment when Georgia scored this touchdown in the third quarter, but if UGA would have opted to kick the extra point instead of going for two this game would have been over in regulation. If all else stayed the same (which is a big assumption) then Georgia would have won the game 28-27 in regulation.
At the end of the day, this doesn't matter all that much because Georgia still won. But can you imagine how upset people would be about this decision had Georgia lost in overtime?
The "analytics" response is interesting because it really doesn't make a whole lot of sense why someone wouldn't want to make it a 10-point game in that moment. Scoring on that two point conversion would make it possible to then take the lead with a touchdown and field goal, but it does seem like playing it safe and just kicking the extra point is the better decision.
But thankfully this decision didn't backfire and UGA still found a way to win in overtime. And after seeing how great of a game it turned into with the eight overtimes, maybe we should be thankful that we got to experience that instead of just winning by one point in regulation.