This is a popular opinion, but I think people are misunderstanding. Nobody is saying you waste a play trying not to score. You simply want to leave yourself enough time to run your three plays, and not much more.
Yasin scored with :48 left. Had he failed to get in, they had two more tries and one timeout. Had they run the play clock down the extra :24 they safely could have to :05, the play would have ended at :24 on the game clock. That's plenty of time to run two plays with one timeout. You could argue to snap it at 10-12 on the play clock and leave a full :30 after the play, but they definitely left more meat on the bone than they should have.
As a result UConn managed to get their win percentage back to 50-50 when it never should have gotten back above 5-10%.