KNOXVILLE, Tenn. — Ty’Son Williams’ momentum stopped at the 3-yard line. He hit a wall.

But he kept pushing. And his teammates helped.

It was slow and consistent. It was the kind of push that’s never quite arrived in the past decade at Tennessee. And inch by inch, inevitability crept closer.

Yes, Tennessee would lose a game it controlled for 59 minutes and 43 seconds. Yes, Tennessee would be 0-2 for the first time since 1988, long before any players on the current roster (and three months before one coach on the staff) were born.

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BYU beat Tennessee 29-26 in double overtime, with Williams providing the final blow as a scrum of more than a dozen players slowly drifted over the goal line.

“You know, it’s hard to figure out how you lose that game,” Tennessee coach Jeremy Pruitt said. “But then you start thinking about it.”

In regulation, BYU (1-1) had already exhausted all three of its timeouts and was down to an unlikely last gasp, facing a third-and-6 on its own 20-yard line with less than 20 seconds to play. Cornerback Alontae Taylor turned his hips and BYU receiver Micah Simon was already more than five yards behind him. Cougars quarterback Zach Wilson found Simon, who made Vols safety Nigel Warrior miss and sprinted to the Vols’ 16-yard line with seven seconds left. Until the chains could reset, time stood still, and BYU’s Jake Oldroyd booted a 33-yard field goal to send the game to overtime.

Pruitt was asked what defense Tennessee was playing on the night’s most surreal play.

“The one that you don’t let them throw it 75 yards in,” Pruitt said. “You play on top of them, the same defense we played the previous three plays when they lost 12 yards.”

Later, Pruitt explained it was Cover 3.

“One of their wide receivers got 20 yards behind our guy that’s supposed to be deeper than the deepest,” Pruitt said of Taylor, who began the play just a handful of yards off the line on the side of the field opposite Tennessee’s staff.

An unthinkable error puts Tennessee in an unthinkable position. The Vols, who host Chattanooga next Saturday, will head to Florida in two weeks without a win against an FBS opponent.

For the first time in nearly a year, the Vols won the battle on the line of scrimmage. They out-rushed the Cougars 242-107 and gave up just one sack while earning four. But the success didn’t pay off in the end.

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“When we’re running the ball, we’re not thinking about the yardage, we’re just trying to control the ball, control the game and control the clock,” Tennessee offensive lineman Marcus Tatum said. “We (ran the ball) at certain moments, but when we really needed it, we just didn’t get it done.”

Like when the Vols’ had a fresh set of downs and just a couple minutes to bleed off the clock and settled for zero yards on three Ty Chandler carries, punting the ball away for the final time.

Or when the Vols had a fourth-and-1 at BYU’s 30-yard line with just more than four minutes to play and receiver Jordan Palmer got stuffed on an end-around.

“We had two chances to put the game away and didn’t do it,” Pruitt said.

Instead, linebacker Will Ignont was left standing at the 30-yard line with his hands on the hips, staring at the north side of Neyland Stadium, where many of the 92,475 fans that helped provide a special atmosphere shuffled out of the stadium gates, dumbfounded at how their team had let them down again.

It’s why defensive lineman Greg Emerson knelt in defeat in the end zone, wondering what had just happened as delirious BYU players stormed the field, helping the reality of one more low point sink in for a once-proud program still desperately trying to find its footing.

Despite a shocking loss to Georgia State as 26-point favorites a week ago, Tennessee fans showed up loud and proud, easily drowning out the thousands of BYU fans who covered the south upper deck and the visitors section on the east side of the stadium in blue.

Just like last week, Vols fans left more unsure than ever that the coach handpicked by godfather Phillip Fulmer in December 2017 would be the one to lead them back to prominence. If anything, they left sure Pruitt would not be that man.

After a defensive mastermind’s team coughs up certain victory via a defensive breakdown by one of the team’s most talented defenders, it’s hard to blame them. When Fulmer assumed the athletic director chair and hired his coach after a fan revolt torpedoed Greg Schiano’s arrival on Rocky Top, fans felt they’d taken back their program and put it in more capable hands.

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Who knows whether or not these hands are more capable, but the play on the field doesn’t look much different than the play that frustrated fans for most of the past decade. And the trajectory of the season looks remarkably similar, too.

This was supposed to be a step forward, the next brick in the foundation that would end with Tennessee taking up permanent residence alongside the SEC East’s upper crust.

Instead, fans were once again treated to crud.

A broken team did not run through the T on a sweaty September evening. Georgia State hadn’t single-handedly driven Tennessee’s season off the rails. But 0-2 is 0-2, and a loss marked by a mistake like Taylor’s can have the same emotional impact of a 30-point drubbing.

We worked this hard for nine months for this?

We paid all that money and drove all that way for this?

 “The bottom line is, there’s a couple errors that we made in the game,” Pruitt said. “That you can’t do.”

Mathematically, the proven sign of progress for the program — a bowl game — drifted further away as Williams crossed the goal line on Saturday night.

And when Simon hauled in an astonishing bomb to keep BYU’s hopes afloat, the vision of Pruitt pushing Tennessee to reclaim its spot among the sport’s elite looked blurrier than ever.

(Photo: Randy Sartin / USA Today)