Some people believe in curses. I don’t.

I do believe a different c-word absolutely wins and loses games in sports, though.

Culture.

The culture of the Tennessee football program is sick. Very sick. Not terminally sick, but bedridden sick.

How else do you explain the past two Saturdays?

How else to you explain the past dozen years?

Losing is a disease. A serious disease. It attacks the healthy cells of a program. And when you lose enough healthy cells, eventually you lose the ability to fight it. If you’re not extremely careful, you can succumb to it.

There’s no other explanation for Tennessee opening the 2019 season with losses to Georgia State and BYU, a pair of programs that brought inferior rosters to Neyland Stadium but found ways to win.

It’s poor sportsmanship to deny credit to the Panthers and the Cougars. They deserve credit for doing the things it took to win in a hostile environment.

Tennessee junior QB Jarrett Guarantano

But let’s be honest: Tennessee lost those games more than Georgia State or BYU won them.

Tennessee’s Jeremy Pruitt, like a lot of football coaches, tends to speak from a micro perspective when dissecting games. It’s not his fault. It’s not even a character flaw. That’s just how coaches are wired. They see more trees than forests. Left to their own devices, they’ll go on and and on about an alignment issue here or a assignment issue there, and they’ll talk your ear off about the small technique issues that arise on every snap.

Are they wrong? No. Not at all.

But the elephant in the room is the macro issue.

The Tennessee football program doesn’t know how to win.

A series of heartbreaks over a dozen years have caused debilitating issues to seep into the pores of everyone in the Anderson Training Center.

There’s no other explanation for Tennessee losing to BYU on Saturday night.

What should have been at least a two-score win in regulation turned into a double-overtime loss.

Could we sit here and list probably a dozen things the Vols could have done to ice that game? You bet we could. Without going over my notes, I can give you plenty. On at least three occasions, quarterback Jarrett Guarantano either missed open receivers for big plays or touchdowns or saw them too late to capitalize on the situation. Tennessee was stuffed on two fourth-and-short plays by not simply calling a sneak and following guard Trey Smith to move the chains. Tennessee failed to gain a first down that would have run out the clock. On at least two occasions, Tennessee’s skill players didn’t reach forward with their other arm to move the chains. On at least three occasions, Tennessee threw the ball behind the sticks on third-and-medium on third-and-short-plays.

Tennessee scored two touchdowns Saturday night, and both were born purely from the brilliance of senior wide receiver Jauan Jennings. The 6-foot-3 alpha male somehow corralled a tipped pass on a ball that wasn’t intended for him on a fourth-and-3 play from the 5-yard line in the first quarter, and he completely bullied a BYU defender to turn an interception into a touchdown in the first overtime.

Without those two plays from Jennings, it’s very possible — perhaps even likely — that Tennessee would have come away with 12 points on eight trips inside the BYU 35-yard line. At best, the Vols would have come away with 15 points on those eight trips inside the 35. There’s bad red-zone offense. There’s terrible red-zone offense. There’s inexcusably bad third-down offense. Then there’s that.

Tennessee sophomore OL K'Rojhn Calbert

Then came Saturday’s hammer blow — and, cruelly, it was a blunder from a Tennessee defense that played so much better than Tennessee’s offense for the first 59 minutes of that game.

On a third-and-6 play from the BYU 20-yard line that snapped with 17 seconds left in regulation, sophomore cornerback Alontae Taylor let BYU’s Micah Simon run right by him, catch a pass from Zach Wilson and rumble 64 yards to the Vols’ 16-yard line with 0:07 left.

I put 0.0% of that on Tennessee’s coaches.

Taylor did the one thing — the only thing — he absolutely couldn’t do. I could live to be 150 years old and not understand what went through his head in that moment. Coaches shouldn’t be responsible for basic common sense that players should have learned years before they ever stepped foot on a college campus.

Blaming Taylor for that loss isn’t fair, though. Tennessee’s offense spent 59 minutes ensuring that only one mistake from the Vols’ defense was required to make that game an uncomfortable one. Tennessee’s offense kept that game on a razor’s edge. It had no business being that close. Aside from red-zone offense — which admittedly is awfully important — the Vols comprehensively won virtually every area of the first 59 minutes and 40 seconds of that game.

All they had to do was tap in the putt. It wasn’t a birdie putt — it was a par putt at best — but it was still a tap-in. And the Vols pulled a driver out of the bag and hit themselves in the head with it.

Tennessee has done this before. See “Malik Foreman at Georgia in 2016” or “Micah Abernathy at Florida in 2017.” As bad those plays were there, they weren’t as bad as Saturday’s blunder. Foreman and Abernathy let down their guards on a play where the quarterback had forever to throw. Taylor just let Simon run right by him. It defied logic.

Which leads me back to the only thing that makes sense.

The Tennessee football program is sick.

Money hasn’t fixed it. Five-star and four-star prospects haven’t fixed it. Time hasn’t fixed it. Fans getting off the mat time and time again to show support hasn’t fixed it.

Tennessee is still paying one former head coach millions of dollars per year to not coach its football program, and the buyout of Pruitt and his staff before the end of this season would cost upwards of $15 million. So that’s not happening. And I don’t think we need to even start that conversation at the moment.

I don’t know what it would take to fix this culture, but I’m convinced no one aside from Nick Saban or Urban Meyer could fix it in less than a couple of years, and neither of those dudes is walking through the door at the moment. You want to pay $15 million in buyouts on top of the millions you’re already spending and then hire a coach who would command a $10 million annual salary and gosh-almighty-knows how much for his staff? That’s not happening.

Pruitt needs more time. I said when he took this job that it would take unprecedented levels of irredeemable ineptitude for me to render judgment before a third season, and I saw enough hope last season to soften my stance on the current situation.

This is a fact, not an opinion: This program has rotted down to its foundation. Rotating coaches every couple of years probably won’t fix it.

I don’t have answers. I’m not sure anyone does. But I know it’s not time to even consider throwing this coach out with the bathwater. Let him bring in his own players. Let him develop those players. See if someone who won at unprecedented levels as an assistant coach can restore some kind of order to a program that desperately needs order. If we’re sitting here looking at the same garbage toward the tail end of Year Three, we can take this conversation to a different level.

Here’s something else I know: If you don’t have a strong stomach or a patient disposition, look away for a bit, because this rebuild won’t be for you.

It can’t be fun to read this diagnosis, but you need to know the truth. The virus of losing is so deeply embedded in the soul of these Vols that I don’t think it can be cleaned for a while.