Kirby Smart laments 4th-down conversion try in Georgia loss

NEW ORLEANS — Coach Kirby Smart wasn’t pointing fingers in the aftermath of a 39-34 loss to Ole Miss in the Sugar Bowl, but the play that might have ultimately doomed Georgia’s season was never supposed to happen.

Facing a fourth-and-2 at its own 33, Georgia initially ran its punt team onto the field. But with an Ole Miss defender on the ground, the injury stoppage gave Smart a chance to reconsider. He put his offense back on the field, he said, with an option to either try to draw the Rebels offsides or take a delay of game penalty before punting.

Instead, Georgia snapped the ball to a surprised Gunner Stockton, and Ole Miss linebacker Suntarine Perkins came unblocked off the edge for the sack.

“We had a misfire there,” Smart said. “The ball was not supposed to be snapped in that situation. That’s on us as coaches.”

Ole Miss took over at the Georgia 23 and scored two plays later to extend its lead to 10 with 9:05 to go.

Smart said Georgia’s analytics actually advised going for it on the fourth down, and after the Bulldogs had blown a 10-point second-half lead, he thought his team had “lost momentum,” but the look from the Ole Miss defense meant the snap shouldn’t have happened.

“That’s their OC’s business,” Ole Miss defensive lineman Princewill Umanmielen said. “That ain’t my business. I see the ball, I go.”

Georgia executed a successful fake punt on fourth down earlier in the half, when receiver Landon Roldan took a reverse handoff and threw a 16-yard pass to Lawson Luckie for a first down. That, too, Smart said, was moment in which Georgia had lost momentum and needed a jolt. The drive ended with a field goal.

On the whole, Smart said, the well-executed fake punt and the botched fourth-down play evened out.

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Georgia still recovered from the miscue, and the Bulldogs tied the score at 34 with less than a minute to play. But a 40-yard completion from Ole Miss quarterback Trinidad Chambliss set up a winning field goal for the Rebels. Georgia’s defense allowed 473 yards, the second-highest total surrendered by the Bulldogs this season.

“They made more plays than we did, and I’ve got to be honest, that’s part of football,” Smart said. “They made more [plays] and outexecuted us, outcoached us, outplayed us.”

In an October matchup with Ole Miss, Georgia trailed by 9 entering the fourth quarter before a dominant final frame sparked a 43-35 win.

On Thursday, the opposite was true. The loss snapped Georgia’s 75-game winning streak — the nation’s longest — when leading at the start of the fourth quarter.

It marked the second straight season Georgia’s title hopes ended in the Superdome. Last season’s loss came down to a lackluster offensive performance. Thursday was a mixed bag of miscues.

When it was over, however, Smart said he had plays he’d “love to go back and do differently,” but he wasn’t hanging his head. Instead, he gushed about the raucous Ole Miss crowd — “it felt like a road game” — Chambliss’ performance under pressure and the defensive game plan from a team that Georgia had beaten two months earlier.

“That’s what the [playoff] was built for,” Smart said, “to have games like that.”