By: Robert Craft

TheSouthernSportsEdition.com news services

Georgia fell in heartbreaking fashion to Ole Miss.

I’ll break down the moments that decided this game and acknowledge a couple winners and losers.

FOUR MOMENTS THAT DECIDED THE GAME:

Ole Miss kicker Lucas Carneiro 55-yard and 56-yard field goals early: So many times in key Georgia games, we’ve seen an opposing kicker turtle in the big moment.

Carneiro couldn’t have been more different. His first field goal of the night? Sugar Bowl record.

His second field goal of the night? Broke his Sugar Bowl record in 10 minutes.

Those two long-distance field goals early in the game were big from a future confidence standpoint for the key game-winner, but it also wound up having major scoreboard implications at multiple points through the game.

Those two early moments would be great foreshadowing for the final moments of the game that follow.

Trinidad Chambliss’ circus act on third-and-7 to start the fourth quarter: Early in the fourth quarter, Georgia led by five facing a key third-down, which had been shortened by a previous play from Chambliss where he flicked an improvised pass to avoid lost yardage.

The next play was even more miraculous. With Quintavius Johnson and Daylen Everette both free and chasing, Chambliss looked like he might be destined for a long, long negative play.

Instead, he pulled off a moment that will go down in Ole Miss and CFP history forever, escaping both, finding Kewan Lacy who made it just past the line-to-gain to extend the drive.

It put CJ Allen and KJ Bolden out of the game briefly, too. A few plays later, after another explosive, Kewan Lacy marched in for a go-ahead score for Ole Miss.

Georgia’s failed fourth-down conversion: Kirby Smart labeled it a misfire in his postgame press conference, and that’s liable to happen when you have a backup center in a high-leverage decision-making fourth down.

Immediately after Ole Miss’ go-ahead touchdown, the Bulldogs went four plays for negative-2 yards, ending in a Gunner Stockton fumble.

The fourth-down failure? Georgia ran the punt team off, replaced it with the offense, and according to Smart, didn’t intend on snapping it.

Malachi Toliver read that the Ole Miss defender jumped, so he snapped it when others weren’t expecting him too. The play was dead on arrival, and the Rebels took a 10-point lead a few moments later.

Georgia’s third-down incompletion on final possession: Georgia tied the game, but at what cost? Georgia’s third-down play before Peyton Woodring’s game-tying field goal had major clock implications.

Georgia elected to dropback with Stockton who targeted Oscar Delp in the back of the end zone, despite running past the back line. It stopped the clock just a hair under a minute.

Hindsight is 20-20, but a run there and settling for a field goal would’ve resulted in a tie game with around than 20 seconds on the clock, something that likely would’ve caused Ole Miss coaches to kneel and play for overtime. Sometimes it’s the little things.

Winners and Losers:

Loser: The ultimate storyline–It felt like it had been written in the stars: Carson Beck vs. Georgia.

The Bulldogs just needed to hold up their end of the bargain, and they didn’t.

Georgia had too many opportunities to spoil away what would’ve gone down as one of the most climatic weeks of off-the-field chatter that there’s ever been. Beck earned his way there, something Georgia was unable to do.

Winner: Fans begging for Kirby Smart self-reflecting on philosophical changes-Every team left in the College Football Playoff has a transfer-portal quarterback running the show.

At least two of the teams remaining — Ole Miss and Indiana — would identify as programs who built their modern-day prominence in college football via a tactical use of the transfer portal.

In multiple cases, there are some aggressive spenders when it comes to certain status of recruitments.

You can fairly ask: What approach is the right approach in today’s day and age? There’s likely not a definitively correct answer to that.

But what will come of this is that Kirby Smart will be given no choice but to evaluate all available strategies to see if something needs to change to modernize Georgia’s approach.

That’s not to say anything specifically will change, but it’s the type of loss that — at the very least — makes you think.

Loser: Smart’s game-management approval rating-It stinks that’s the case because there were certain moments — like the fake punt — that could’ve added to the legacy of Kirby Smart’s crucial-moment decisions in College Football Playoff games.

Instead, most focus will lean on the third- and fourth-down calls that made Georgia’s challenge of overcoming their failures virtually impossible.

There will be questions about play-calling, or personnel decisions. It wasn’t Smart’s sharpest performance, and he was the first to admit it on Thursday night.

Final Thoughts-There will be a lot of debate in the Georgia world over the next year because of what unfolded in this game.

We’ll get into that over the weeks and months to come. There will be questions about coaches. There will be questions about roster-building plans. There will be questions about decision-making. This isn’t the space where we’re trying to tell fans to not feel or react to those types of things.

A three-year College Football playoff win drought — this isn’t a national championship drought we’re talking about here — is enough to warrant those questions.

But it’s to put that on the back burner for a second to accept something that’s sometime hard to swallow.

Trinidad Chambliss was the best football player in New Orleans on Thursday. He came up in every big moment he was asked to. He threw for 362 yards, and he made it look run-of-the-mill — because it is.

He made the difference-making highlight-reel plays. Chambliss was the best quarterback Georgia faced all year, both times.

There were no answers from the defense. This was a guy playing Division-II ball at Ferris State a year ago, and now he can flip Sugar Bowls on their head.

I know it’s trendy to criticize your own team’s shortcoming when they’re not good enough. Smart is going to do that himself, rest assured.

But this Chambliss historic performance against Georgia deserves the most serious tip-of-the-cap. He was as sensational as any player has been against Georgia in the Kirby Smart era.

It also shows that you need to play at an elite level or better to beat this Georgia program, and that’s exactly what Chambliss did.