Tommy Tuberville remembers being in the visiting locker room at Davis Wade Stadium a decade ago and feeling, if nothing else, a sense of relief. The locker room was subdued, and Auburn's offensive players didn't say much, but Tuberville remembers them walking over to the defensive side of the room and congratulating them.

A win is a win, especially in the SEC, but this one was just different. On the night of Sept. 13, 2008, in Starkville, Miss., it felt like everyone lost.

"It wasn't a big celebration," Tuberville told AL.com. "We knew we struggled. We knew we were lucky to win.... We definitely didn't get any confidence out of it."

Ten years have passed since Auburn's 3-2 win against Mississippi State, a game that has for better or worse become a part of college football lore. It was, and remains, the pinnacle of hilariously bad football, the gold standard of awfulness against which other bad games are judged, and a game so ignominiously inept that some of those involved have tried to forget it ever happened.

The two teams combined for just 431 total yards, converted 3-of-30 third-downs attempts (and 1-of-4 fourth downs), committed four turnovers, 16 penalties and punted 18 times. Mississippi State had 116 total yards and its lone points came on a fourth-quarter safety courtesy an offensive holding penalty that one longtime Auburn fan described as the "most hilariously bureaucratic, inept way to score two points."

Unsurprisingly, neither team's coaching staff survived the season.

"Oh my God, that set football back 20 years," then-Mississippi State assistant J.B. Grimes said. "My goodness, 3-2. Wow."

Auburn 3, Mississippi State 2 was a perfect storm of badness that was experienced by 52,911 and broadcast across the country on ESPN2.

Auburn was entering the 10th and final season of Tuberville's tenure. The Tigers entered the year ranked in the top 10, featured a vaunted defense and made the offseason switch from a pro-style offense to the spread, bringing in Tony Franklin as offensive coordinator to implement the change following a woefully disappointing offensive display in 2007 under Al Borges. The problem for Auburn was it didn't have the personnel to effectively run Franklin's system, and Tuberville knew as much but still wanted to go full-bore with the change because it was quickly becoming a trend across college football.

"Do we want to go 100 percent? Do we want to go 50 percent with the type of players we had?" Tuberville said. "We just -- that was me; I just made a decision that, hey, if we're going to do this, let's get in and go, take our lumps and learn on the way."

Mississippi State, meanwhile, was in Year 5 under Sylvester Croom, who declined to be interviewed for this story, but peaked the season prior when the Bulldogs went 8-5 and earned their first bowl berth in seven years. The team was predicted to finish fourth in the SEC West in 2008, but it quickly became evident the Bulldogs -- one of the remaining teams still running a two-back, pro-style offense -- were taking a step back, starting the year with a 22-14 loss to Louisiana Tech.

When the two teams met in Week 3, Tuberville anticipated a low-scoring affair. The Tigers had a top-tier defense that was equipped to stop a pro-style offense, while Auburn's mismatching personnel on offense left Tuberville with the expectation of a low output against Mississippi State's defense.

No one could have truly expected the comedy of errors that was to come that night.

The game's first nine drives ended in punts, including four three-and-outs and two other drives that lasted just four plays. Auburn had some success moving the ball, putting together a pair of seven-play drives during that early-game span, but each time the offense stalled out.

The first scoring opportunity of the night didn't come until midway through the second quarter, when the Tigers scored on a 35-yard Wes Byrum field goal. After the two sides exchanged three more fruitless drives that ended in punts, Byrum missed a 42-yard field goal attempt wide left with 19 seconds remaining in the half, and Auburn took its 3-0 lead into the break.

"That (offense) was brutal to watch," said Auburn receivers coach Kodi Burns, a quarterback on the 2008 team who was sure to emphasize that he didn't actually see the field that night. "Three points is tough."

Somehow, it got even worse in the second half.

Auburn quarterback Chris Todd fumbled on the Tigers' first play of the third quarter, gifting Mississippi State's struggling offense a short field. The Bulldogs turned that into a five-play, 11-yard drive that resulted with a 38-yard Adam Carlson field goal attempt that fell short of the crossbar.

Three drives later, Bynum missed another field goal attempt -- this one wide left from 22 yards out. The game's next five possessions all ended in punts, with two more three-and-outs.

"That game is just -- it's one that's like, how do we have a game that bad?" said umpire Wilbur Hackett, a member of the officiating crew that night. "How do we have a game that uneventful, unexciting? How do two teams in a conference like that -- and that was just 10 years ago; it ain't 50 years ago. It's 10... There's not anything good you can say about a game like that, except that it probably went really quick. We probably broke a record getting out of there."

Then the game veered from forgettable to memorably bad territory.

Mississippi State's Blake McAdams boomed a 52-yard punt that pinned Auburn at its own 3-yard line midway through the fourth quarter. Following a 1-yard Ben Tate run and an incompletion by Todd, the Tigers faced third-and-9 from their own 4.

With Auburn in a four-wide shotgun set, Todd dropped back into the shadow of his own goalpost before rolling out to his right and misfiring to Montez Billings down the right sideline. As Todd rolled out, center Ryan Pugh took down defensive tackle Cortez McCraney in the end zone, drawing a flag from Hackett for offensive holding. Ten years later, Hackett stands by the call.

"I know I wouldn't have called it if it wasn't there," Hackett told AL.com. "I'm one of those kinds of officials that you got to make me pull my flag out. If that's what I called, then that's what it was."

Since the penalty occurred in the end zone, it resulted in a safety -- Mississippi State's first and only points of the night.

"I do remember it was a blatant hold," McCraney told AL.com. "I know as a D-lineman, offensive linemen are taught that you can get away with holding on certain techniques if it's inside, but I think it was so blatant with how he did it... I was like, 'Man, they got to call it,' and they did. I'm thankful they did."

Said Tuberville: "I never felt like they were going to score any points, but the safety, they kind of fell into that. Man, 3-0 would've felt a lot better, sounded better -- but 3-2, it sounded like a baseball score."

Fifteen of the 18 Major League Baseball games played that day were higher-scoring, while two others featured scores identical to the Auburn-Mississippi State game, the final seven minutes of which were riddled with slapstick offensive futility.

Mississippi State turned it over on downs, and then Auburn coughed up the ball two plays later and led to another Bulldogs turnover on downs.

Auburn had a chance to ice the game with 3:40 to play and the ball on the Mississippi State 48-yard line but running back Tristan Davis couldn't corral Todd's backfield toss, and McCraney recovered it for the Bulldogs at their own 34 with 2:29 to play.

"Teeth-gnashing frustration, really," said longtime Auburn fan and former SEC Country writer Jerry Hinnen, who was watching the game in Ann Arbor, Mich., with friends. "The fan experience of watching 3-2 was definitely frustrating but it wasn't at the same level of frustration that Franklin's offense would get to later in the season. It wasn't as bad as Tennessee a few weeks later."

Mississippi State's last hopes were dashed one play later, when quarterback Wesley Carroll -- who finished the game 10-of-25 passing for 78 yards -- attempted a deep pass down the right sideline that Walter McFadden acrobatically intercepted to mercifully seal the game.

"I don't know how I feel about this, but you know how some people say you'd rather get blown out than lose a game that close?" McCraney said. ".... It was just tough, man, especially being in such good position too to be able to win that game and then lose like that, it was just hard."

Auburn ran out the clock thanks to a 39-yard run by Tate, and then the team returned to the Plains 3-0 overall and 1-0 in SEC play -- a record that hardly reflected the team's play to that point. Auburn lost the following week at home to LSU and only won two more games the rest of the season, against Tennessee and UT-Martin.

Franklin was fired four games after that fiasco in Starkville, his stint at Auburn lasting just seven games. The Tigers finished the year 5-7, and Tuberville resigned at the end of the year. Croom did the same at Mississippi State, which finished 4-8 overall and tied with Auburn, Arkansas and Kentucky at the bottom of the SEC standings.

The game itself was quickly canonized online by the popular college football site Every Day Should Be Saturday and has been colloquially referred to as the "Baby I'm Burning" game after EDSBS contributor Holly Anderson synced up the game's "highlights" to the 1978 Dolly Parton hit of the same name.

"The minute that game ended, I remember being seized with the urge to do something," Anderson told AL.com via email. "I knew we had just witnessed something truly special, and I wanted to preserve the moment."

For many college football fans, and not just those of Auburn and Mississippi State, the "Baby I'm Burning" video has become somewhat synonymous with the 3-2 game, even a decade later.

"I cannot tell you how much that delights me," Anderson said. "I'm tickled to death. While several of my dearest friends are Auburn products, as a whole it is not a fanbase I would characterize as having much of a sense of humor, particularly about themselves. But if I let that stop me, I suppose I wouldn't be on the internet at all."

While there have been plenty of other bad football games in the decade since -- including the 6-3 Virginia Tech-Wake Forest overtime game in 2014 that was scoreless at the end of regulation and the majority of Kansas' games -- none has matched the awesome futility of Auburn 3, Mississippi State 2.

"It's become a little bit of a 'This is Spinal Tap' type thing, where at the time it was already pretty funny, you know, ha-ha 3-2," Hinnen said. "... You can't really get a more hilariously inept offensive score line than that. The 0-0 Virginia Tech-Wake Forest game is sort of the other hallmark of the genre, but even that, it's kind of -- it's like a fine wine; it just doesn't have the same texture to it when we're talking about savoring terrible football that 3-2 does exactly."

Ten years later, as another top-10 Auburn team with a struggling offense prepares for a trip to Davis Wade Stadium, the game still resonates, even if Grimes said the best course of action was to "wipe it from your memory banks."

McCraney, whose playing career ended in 2009 after a camp invite with the Baltimore Ravens, said Mississippi State fans have approached him over the years specifically for the infamous 3-2 game. Tuberville, who does regular speaking engagements, said that game is still among the most frequently brought up among fans he meets.

"Just thank God we won the game and that we didn't lose 2-0," Tuberville said. "That would probably be even more of a weird situation, losing 2-0.... But every year someone calls me about that game and brings it up.

"It's not horrible memories; we won it."

Tom Green is an Auburn beat reporter for Alabama Media Group. Follow him on Twitter @Tomas_Verde.