After beating Notre Dame Sunday in Atlanta, Mike White said any momentum gained by the victory would have been for naught had his Bulldogs not been able to follow it up with a positive effort Wednesday against Chattanooga.

Fortunately for White, the outcome was just as he hoped. Georgia bounced back after trailing for most of the contest to outscore the Mocs 7-2 over the final 1:48 to post a 72-65 win.

“That was huge,” White said. “Chattanooga certainly had all our attention. They’re going to win a bunch of games.”

With one more non-conference game against Ryder (Dec. 28) before SEC play Jan. 4 against Auburn, it remains to be seen how good this team can be.

However, considering Georgia won just six games a season ago, this is certainly a different-looking squad than it was last year.

Confidence and poise are certainly showing to be on a different level.

“Overall, I think we always felt that we were going to win the game,” said Kario Oquendo, who led the Bulldogs (9-3) with 22 points. “At some point in the game, we were just going to have to take it over and kept telling the team in the huddle, we’ve got to take over the game, we’ve got to take over the game. People’s minds were in a lot of different places, but if we could just shut that out, we were going to win.”

White agreed.

“We didn’t do all the right things, but thought the intestinal fortitude down the stretch, the body language, the ‘we’re going to get a stop’ (mentality) was there,” White said. “We had some defensive swagger that you need against a good team that’s difficult to defend, which is really something you want every day.”

Chattanooga (8-5) twice led by as many as eight points before Georgia finally surged ahead 62-60 on a pair of free throws by Oquendo with 2:58 left.

Jamal Johnson’s sixth three-pointer later tied the game at 63. But the Bulldogs scored the next seven points to surge ahead by seven with just 19 seconds left to play.

“Resilience, mental toughness, and a little bit of poise,” said White, when asked about his team’s final push. “We’ve still got so much to improve on, but I’m really proud of the fight down the stretch, the confidence, and swagger offensively. Kario I thought was fantastic.”

Oquendo scored 16 of his 22 points in the second half.

“That makes me so happy to see my brother go crazy,” said Terry Roberts, who finished with 14 points and a team-high six assists. “We all know what he can do; I’m so excited for him.”

For those looking for a reason why Georgia has won five of its last six games, look no further than the Bulldogs’ ever-improving assist-to-turnover ratio.

In the first six games, Georgia ATR was an unsightly 6-1. In the last six games, the ATR sits at .14 turnovers for every assist.

“We continue to spread out that assist-to-turnover margin,” White said. “There were some things that we didn’t do good, but Chattanooga is really good and going to have a good chance to play in the NCAA Tournament.”

Boxscore

• Oquendo notched his seventh double-digit and first 20-point performance of the season. This marked Oquendo’s 33rd career double-digit and 11th career 20-point outing.

• Terry Roberts posted his double-digit performance of the season ninth, while Braeden Bridges tallied his fifth and Jailyn Ingram logged his second. This marked Ingram’s 74th career double-digit outing, Bridges’ 54th, and Roberts’ 33rd.

• Off the Bench: On the season, the Bulldogs bench has tallied 311 points and has posted a +183 scoring margin over its opponents’ bench players.

• The Bulldogs outscored the Mocs 32-8 in the paint on the afternoon.

• Ball Security: Georgia recorded more turnovers than assists in each of its first six games (62 assists and 99 turnovers), since then the Bulldogs have produced a positive assists-to-turnovers ratio (90 assists and 79 turnovers).

• Roberts tallied six assists on the afternoon. This marked his fifth consecutive game with five or more assists – the longest streak of his career.

• Chattanooga’s 14 3-pointers made ranks T-9th all-time by a Georgia opponent, the most since Florida on Feb. 26, 2022. The 39 3-point attempts taken by the Mocs rank 5th all-time among Bulldog opponents—the most since Belmont on Mar. 16, 2016.