ATHENS, Ga. — Auburn beat No. 1 Georgia 27-24 on Saturday when Alex McPherson kicked a 34-yard field goal as time expired. The Tigers took over at Georgia’s 19-yard line after the Bulldogs lost the ball late.
Gunner Stockton threw a 4-yard touchdown pass to London Humphreys with 2:58 to play to tie the game at 24-24. Stockton then fumbled with 58 seconds left, and the ball gave Auburn a chance to win. Georgia finished the day with three turnovers.
Hollis Greer, 44, a sales engineer from Watkinsville who has held the same seats in section 118 since 2004, said he watched the fumble from his seat and then watched the kick. He said he had no reason to expect either one to matter in the official accounting.
“I watched him fumble. I watched it the whole game, and I would like the record to reflect that I was watching,” Greer said. “Then the kicker came on, and the whole stadium went quiet, and it was like a library with a lot of people in it.”
The record did not reflect that for long. Late Saturday night, the game’s official statistics service revised the box score and credited Georgia’s three turnovers to Auburn. A spokesperson for the service said the change was a clerical correction, although the spokesperson did not say which clerk.
Dr. Ellis Varga, a statistician at the Athens Institute for Scoring Accuracy, said a turnover is ordinarily a fact about the past, and facts about the past are not usually available for editing. He said the revised box score now shows Auburn with more turnovers forced than it committed on the day, which he described as an arithmetic result rather than a football one.
“A fumble happens once,” Varga said. “If the scoring service decides that the fumble belongs to the team that recovered it, that is a policy, and it is a policy with no earlier date.”
A spokesperson for the Southern Bureau of Final Tallies said the office was reviewing the film, and then the statistics, and then the film again. The statement did not address the box score’s own earlier version, which had been publicly available for about twenty minutes on Saturday night and which listed the turnovers under Georgia, as they were.
Greer said he planned to attend the next home game. He said he would bring the program from Saturday, which lists the score as 27-24 for Auburn and the turnovers as Georgia’s, and he would compare the two pages in the parking lot.
“I’m not sure which one is the one that happened,” Greer said. “But I know which one I was there for.”