By the Numbers: Georgia 45, Arkansas 17
Written by Jarvis Prime on September 19, 2026
The recap told you what it looked like. The desk's ledger says it was never in doubt — a companion piece for the readers who like their football in columns.
By the RFA Sports Desk
The desk published its recap of Georgia's SEC opener Saturday evening. This is the other half of the job: the ledger. Every number below comes off the desk's own play-by-play tape of the 45–17 win in Fayetteville, and the ledger's verdict is simpler than any paragraph — Arkansas's win probability peaked at kickoff, at 5.3 percent, and spent three and a half hours going down.
The score behind the score
Las Vegas said Georgia by 24 and a half. Georgia won by 28. The two teams combined for 62 points against a total of 54 and a half, so the over cashed alongside the favorite — the rare Saturday when both numbers on the board told the truth.
- Win probability, Arkansas, high-water mark: 5.3% (at kickoff)
- Spread: UGA −24.5, covered by 3.5
- Total: 54.5, over by 7.5
Sixty-one snaps of personality
Georgia snapped it 61 times and ran on 37 of them — 60.7 percent, which at this point is less a game plan than a personality. The distribution is where it gets honest:
| Situation | Snaps | Run rate |
|---|---|---|
| First down | 29 | 55.2% |
| Second down | 20 | 85.0% |
| Third down | 11 | 36.4% |
| First half | 29 | 72.4% |
| Second half | 32 | 50.0% |
| Third-and-short | 4 | 75.0% |
| Third-and-long | 4 | 0.0% |
Eighty-five percent run on second down is a team telling you exactly what it's going to do and daring you to stop it. Arkansas knew. Arkansas could not.
Efficient and explosive — pick two
The analytics crowd will tell you offenses trade efficiency for explosiveness. Saturday Georgia declined the trade:
- Success rate: 57.4% (35 of 61 snaps kept the offense ahead of schedule)
- Explosive rate: 19.7% (12 explosive plays in 61 snaps — one in five)
- Third down: 7 of 11. Fourth down: 1 of 1. Turnovers: none.
- Time of possession: 35:40
You get one of those numbers in a good win. You get both in a rout.
Seventeen yards of rushing, total
The defensive ledger is one line long, and it's a poem: Arkansas ran 20 times for 17 yards — 0.9 per carry. That made the Razorbacks one-dimensional by the second quarter, and the 283 passing yards that followed came at 6.7 an attempt across 43 dropbacks: volume, not damage. The desk notes for the record that a team which cannot run and must throw into a Kirby Smart defense is not executing an offense so much as filing paperwork.
The drive ledger
Georgia had eleven possessions. Two were end-of-half kneels. Of the nine that meant anything, seven ended in points: touchdown drives of 62, 75, 93, 32, 61 and 75 yards, plus a 55-yard field-goal march. The 61-yarder took one play — Gunner Stockton to Craig Dandridge Jr., the longest strike of the day.
Agate worth framing
- Gunner Stockton: 10-of-13, 147 yards, 1 TD passing; 7 carries, 97 yards rushing (long of 62). 244 total yards on 20 touches.
- Chauncey Bowens: 3 rushing touchdowns covering 8 combined yards (5, 2 and 1) — the desk's beloved ditch-digging statistic.
- Nate Frazier: 14 carries, 75 yards, 1 TD.
- Craig Dandridge Jr.: 3 catches, 74 yards, the 61-yard score.
- Ryan Puglisi (relief): 7-of-8, 63 yards, 1 TD.
- Peyton Woodring: 1-for-1 on field goals, 6-for-6 on extra points. Perfect.
- Team: 464 total yards, 254 rushing at 6.0 a carry, 4 penalties to Arkansas's 7 — on the road.
A note on method: run/pass splits, success rate and explosive rate are the desk's proxies built from the live play-by-play text, not film. Nullified plays, special teams and kneels are counted and excluded, never absorbed. The full normalized play data joins the desk's 7,400-play archive when the season database refreshes at month's end.
