With 5.6 seconds remaining in Georgia's game at Texas A&M, the Bulldogs had the ball with a chance to win.

J.J. Frazier received a pass from Jordan Harris, drove to his left and dished a bounce pass to Yante Maten in the post. The clock at that point still read 5.6 seconds. And when Maten was fouled on his would-be game-winning shot, there were ... 5.6 seconds left in the game.

See the problem? The clock froze.

Instead of Maten going to the line with a chance to win the game, the officials went to the monitors and determined that the foul had occurred after time would have run out. The game was therefore ruled as a finished result, with Texas A&M the winner, 63-62.

It's a bitter pill to swallow for a Georgia team that entered the day as the "first team out" of the NCAA tournament field, according to Joe Lunardi's projection.

Mark Fox remained calm during a lengthy explanation of the ruling by the officials at midcourt, but afterward the Georgia head coach was vocal in his displeasure.

"Our kid [Frazier] looks up and thinks he has time to make a play, but he doesn't," Fox said. "I don't know who stopped the clock. I'd like to know."

ESPN's Andy Katz learned from Texas A&M officials after the game that the problem was traced to a "belt pack malfunction." So one failure was technological; the other was administrative. It's up to the officials in that situation to catch the problem while there's still time to fix it.

Strictly speaking, the officials were correct. The time lapse between the clock freezing at 5.6 and the foul on Maten is at least six seconds in duration. In theory, the Bulldogs had 40 minutes to win and came up just short.

But even when we know what happened, the larger point still remains.

Georgia didn't merely deserve 40 minutes to try to win on Saturday, the Bulldogs have the right to 40 correctly timed and administered minutes.

Maybe Frazier made the dribbling and passing decisions that he did because every time he, his teammates on the floor and especially the players and coaches on the sideline glanced at the clock, they thought that there were still five-plus seconds left in the game.

With a running clock, the noise from your own sideline steadily increases in volume, telling you it's time to shoot the ball. That didn't happen in College Station, because the clock stopped working.

Granted, the Bulldogs put their fate in the hands of the officials in the first place by squandering a 13-point second-half lead. Go into the last possession with a lead of six or eight points and no one's talking about the clock freezing in the final six seconds. But it didn't play out that way for UGA.

Now Georgia is 4-3 in SEC play, with the three losses coming by a combined margin of 11 points. The Bulldogs were already on the bubble, so one game either way could make all the difference for Fox's team.

The good news for the Dawgs is that they'll play six of their last 11 conference games at home. One of those home dates will be against Kentucky. Win there on Feb. 18 (or, of course, at Rupp Arena on the last day of January) and chances are much better that the selection committee will look past a clock snafu.

Fox's team excels at denying 3-point opportunities to opponents, and at 6-foot-8 Maten is one of the most effective interior scorers in the SEC. Georgia fans hope that strengths like these will be enough for the Bulldogs to return to the NCAA tournament after just missing the cut last season.

In fact, it's likely that UGA's tournament fate could be a close call either way. With that in mind, I propose one additional piece of instruction for the men's basketball committee when it convenes in March.

Don't let this decision come down to simply calling the game at A&M a "bad loss" for Georgia. Maybe it would have been a bad loss if the 40 minutes had been correctly measured and administered, but the Bulldogs never got the chance to find out.