Auburn Stuns No. 1 Georgia 27-24 on Alex McPherson's Walk-Off Kick in Athens

Auburn beat No. 1 Georgia 27-24 in Athens on Saturday night, and the game was decided in the last minute by a fumble, a late hit and a kicker who was not supposed to have a career at all. Georgia led 14-0, tied the game with 2:58 left, then lost the ball with 58 seconds remaining. Alex McPherson kicked the 34-yard winner as time expired.

Georgia started this game the way the No. 1 team is supposed to start it. Two drives, two touchdowns, 14-0 inside the first quarter, and a Sanford Stadium crowd settling in for a routine Saturday. What followed was the opposite. Auburn scored the next 24 points, Georgia needed almost the whole fourth quarter to pull level, and the game was decided by the two things Kirby Smart said afterward were hardest to accept: turnovers and undisciplined penalties.

How did Auburn score 24 unanswered points?

With its quarterback’s legs and one trick play. The comeback began with a running back pass to Keshaun Singleton, and it ran through Byrum Brown all afternoon. Brown finished 15-of-26 for 150 yards and a touchdown through the air and carried 26 times for 115 yards and another touchdown, per Auburn Wire’s final stats. Auburn piled up 192 rushing yards against a Georgia defense that had been allowing under 75 a game, a figure Smart himself raised postgame, via Sports Illustrated. Georgia, which had beaten Alabama in a 20-17 game full of officiating arguments last week, spent this Saturday chasing a quarterback it could not pin down.

Brown’s biggest sequence came after the scariest moment of his day. Sliding in the second quarter, he took a hit to the head from Georgia defender Khamari Brooks and stayed down while trainers worked on him, the Montgomery Advertiser reports. He missed one play. Seven plays later he threw a 9-yard jump ball touchdown to Chas Nimrod that tied the game at 14, and he played the rest of the afternoon. Nimrod finished with six catches for 60 yards.

What was the ruling on the hit on Brown?

A personal foul on Brooks, and the record stops cleanly there. Reports of the reviewed call disagree with each other. The Advertiser’s main article says Brooks was penalized for targeting upon review; the Advertiser’s own live blog entry for the same play says he was flagged for a personal foul and was not called for targeting after review. Auburn Wire’s live account records a personal foul and nothing more. No report describes an ejection, which targeting would have required. Until a fuller official account appears, the honest summary is a personal foul, a one-play absence for Brown, and a wording conflict between two reports from the same newsroom. Disputed calls and ejections have run through this season’s coverage, from the two ejections on the opening kickoff in London to Saturday’s targeting arguments elsewhere. Georgia fans have seen the other side of a call like this, when a Georgia player was the one shoved and the league office got involved in a different kind of incident, and this page treats disputed calls the same way in both directions: report what is agreed, label what is not.

How did the final minute unfold?

Georgia tied the game at 24 with 2:58 left, Stockton throwing a 4-yard touchdown to London Humphreys at the end of a 94-yard drive, per NBC Sports. Georgia got the ball back with a chance to win it. Stockton ran, reached the Auburn 46, and lost the ball with 58 seconds left, the Associated Press reports. Auburn recovered. It was Georgia’s third turnover of the game and Stockton’s third as well, after two interceptions.

Auburn still needed yards. It got 15 of them from Georgia. On the final drive, defensive end Gabe Harris Jr. hit Brown late after an incomplete pass and was flagged for roughing the passer, moving the ball to the Georgia 19 with 15 seconds left, per the AP and Sportradar’s play-by-play record. Brown ran once more, Georgia used its timeouts, and McPherson came on with three seconds left. One detail from the drive remains unsettled in the coverage: the AP names safety Sylvester Smith-Reed as the player who recovered Stockton’s fumble, while Auburn Wire’s final stats credit Jared Smith with a fumble recovery. Both agree on the part that mattered, which is that Auburn had the ball.

Who is Alex McPherson, and why does his kick carry extra weight?

He is Auburn’s senior kicker and the younger brother of Cincinnati Bengals kicker Evan McPherson. In 2024, severe ulcerative colitis and Crohn’s disease cost him his entire large intestine, NBC Sports reports. He lost 55 pounds and weighed 110 pounds when he was admitted to hospital. At SEC Media Days in July he said he was kicking as well as he had before he got sick. On Saturday he went 2-for-2, from 49 yards in the second quarter and from 34 as time expired, and his second kick ended a nine-game Auburn losing streak in this rivalry. It was Auburn’s first win in Athens since 2005 and, per NBC Sports, its first win over a top-ranked Georgia team since 1942.

What did the coaches say afterward?

Smart pointed at his own team. The undisciplined penalties were “probably the most difficult thing” about the loss, he said, via Sports Illustrated, adding that it takes restraint not to commit them and Georgia did not show it. His other theme was Brown: a quarterback run game, he said, is hard to defend, and Georgia’s rushing defense had its worst day of the season.

On the Auburn side, first-year head coach Alex Golesh gave the day its most replayed moment. His son Barrett had asked him two days before the game whether he could come onto the field after a win, USA Today reports, and Barrett was standing beside him, in a white Auburn jersey, during the postgame television interview. Golesh thanked the players who had stayed at Auburn and said the program would be built back one game at a time.

How unusual is a No. 1 losing like this, two weeks running?

Unusual enough that the sport has not seen it in more than three decades. Oklahoma beat then-No. 1 Texas 27-24 last Saturday, by the same score, and theScore reports this is the first time since 1990 that the AP No. 1 has lost to an unranked opponent in back-to-back weeks. The same report notes that Georgia’s 53-game winning streak against unranked teams is over, and that Smart is now 65-1 in games where Georgia held a 14-point lead. Defensive players staying on the field after heated plays has been a theme of this Georgia season and of others, including the Oregon case where a swing at a quarterback drew no flag and no team punishment, which is part of why the Brown hit drew so much attention in the moment.

What happens next for both teams?

Georgia’s playoff position is damaged, not destroyed. A 6-1 team with a win at Alabama still holds strong cards, but the margin is thinner now, and the Bulldogs’ next game is the one that has undone seasons before: Florida in Atlanta on October 31, after a bye, per the AP. Florida beat Texas 27-24 on Saturday, so Georgia gets no soft landing. Auburn, 4-2 under Golesh, hosts LSU next Saturday, per the AP, with the kind of win that changes how a first-year staff is judged. The ranking fallout lands Sunday, when the new polls will name a No. 1 that is neither Texas nor Georgia.