Georgia football's win over Auburn was tale of two halves. The Bulldogs played about as bad as they could for most of the first half, but in the second half they looked like a true National Championship contender. Add all of that together and it equals a historic 20-10 victory over Auburn.
While the second half was a near perfect performance from Georgia, there was one moment that Kirby Smart wishes he could have back. Ironically that moment was when Gunner Stockton scored the game-sealing touchdown with two minutes to play in the game.
Kirby Smart was unhappy with Gunner Stockton's final touchdown
With two minutes to play and Georgia leading 13-10, Stockton faked a handoff and soared into the end zone to give Georgia a 10 point lead over Auburn. This sent Georgia fans into a frenzy because it appeared to have guaranteed UGA a victory over their hated rival, but that is actually not the case.
Stockton only needed three yards to pick up a first down, and had he gone down short of the end zone Georgia could have kneeled the ball a few times to end the game. This would have kept the ball out of Auburn's hands and given them zero chance at mounting a comeback of their own.
During Smart's postgame press conference, he discussed how Stockton was told to go down before this play, but he misunderstood what his assignment was.
"Go down," Smart said via 247sports.com. "We won the game. So they'll be sending people to investigate that one because that's a three to seven. It's a three to 10 score. But we were thinking slide slide. He didn't hear us say that we told all the players that we're gonna get the ball. And Gunner thought we meant if we score, we win. And I was saying if we slide we could snap we could kneel the ball out. They couldn't stop us to end the game. So we had to go out and play those defensive snaps for no reason. That's another analytics."
At the end of the day this doesn't really matter because Auburn did not comeback to tie or win this game, but this will be a good learning moment for Stockton going forward so he knows what to do next time. So Georgia fans can focus on celebrating this touchdown while Stockton can learn what to do different next time.