Florida State specifically prepared for a Kick Six scenario. It didn’t work.

Georgia Tech beat Florida State on the last play of the game, a 78-yard blocked field goal, Florida State’s first loss of the year and the first FSU loss in conference play in over 1,000 days.

The game brought to mind the famed Kick Six from the 2013 Iron Bowl. Both games featured one team teeing up a 56-yard field goal with only a few ticks left on the clock in a tied ballgame, hoping to get a win. Both times, that kick ended up resulting with the other team sprinting back with the ball for a game-winning touchdown with zeros on the clock.

We took a look back at what Florida State said about the Kick Six at the time. Maybe we should’ve seen Saturday’s finish coming!

First, Jimbo Fisher, defending Nick Saban’s decision to kick:

“I mean, Nick knows his players better than anybody,” Fisher said in the Orlando Sentinel. “We can all doubt, but you don’t know what that guys is capable of. He watches him every day, and he’s been hitting 60-yarders and he had the wind at his back, why not try and win that game on the road and have a kick?”...Now, you’ve got to go over and cover him. I’ll guarantee Nick has coached that up, I promise you that. We do it here, and that’s the way we handle that. There’s chances in everything you do. If he makes it, he’s a hero. You play to win the game, you don’t play not to lose the game.”

Fisher further said that he tried practicing the Kick Six scenario... but that superstar kicker Roberto Aguayo wouldn’t miss short, preventing the team from practicing the team Fisher wanted them to practice.

“Well I move it back to 64 yards, and he screwed my drill up, he made the dadgum kick,” Fisher said.Aguayo has been really, really, really, really, really great for Florida State, and we’ll almost surely see him in the NFL someday. So Fisher had plenty of reason to assume he’d make the kick. But in 2014, when Aguayo was asked about the Kick Six, he said he would’ve been in position to make the tackle:

Q: Do you make that tackle?A: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. When I watched that I was like, “Oh my God.” First of all, the kicker gets rocked. And the punter can’t make the tackle. But it is what it is. I’m always doing tackling drills at practice. I’m ready for that.

Q: But you would’ve made the kick.

A. If I missed, at least I would’ve had the distance.

Aguayo was the last man back on the Georgia Tech play. He really did almost make the play. Afterwards, he looked back on the Kick Six:

It’s easy to say you’ll be ready for a football catastrophe. Aguayo is probably a great tackler for a kicker. And Fisher was smart to run the team through Kick Six simulations, and was smart to send out an all-world kicker for a potential game-winning attempt.

But college football throws the craziest scenarios possible at you. And as Fisher and Aguayo found out Saturday, you can’t prepare for that until it happens to you.