Jason Campbell had never seen anything like it. He never saw anything like it again in his football career.

It was Dec. 1, 2001. He was a redshirt freshman starting quarterback, and he was on the same bus as head coach Tommy Tuberville as Auburn rode toward Tiger Stadium in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Looking back now, that was probably the worst place anyone wearing blue and orange could have been that day.

LSU fans surrounded them on all sides. The ones closest to the bus hit and pushed it so hard that it literally rocked back and forth. The ones farther back pelted it with cigars. Police had to come and move people out of the way just so the bus had enough room to get through the crowd and drop the team off at the stadium.

“It was a pretty wild experience. I’m talking the whole time, just beating on the bus,” Campbell told the Montgomery Advertiser this week. “I was like, ‘What in the world?’ It was electric. It was a crazy atmosphere.

“It was almost like they wanted war on us.”

That was Auburn’s first game in Baton Rouge since 1999. LSU fans hadn’t forgotten that one. Auburn won 41-7 in the first conference game of Tuberville’s tenure as head coach, which happened to be on the same day as his 45th birthday. He brought cigars to celebrate. He and players filtered out of the locker room after the game was over to smoke them on the field.

That didn't sit too well with anyone in Baton Rouge.

Two years later, Campbell said there was so much security surrounding Tuberville when he arrived at the team hotel that players could hardly get their stuff off the bus. They drove past a billboard with the message, “Smoke this, Tubs,” on their way to the game Saturday. Tiger Stadium was littered with posters of the Auburn head coach, and most probably weren’t too friendly.

“It was upsetting. It was in your own place, man. It was in the newspaper the next day, the big paper, The Advocate, with those guys smoking cigars. It was a big deal,” LSU quarterback Rohan Davey said. “Tiger Stadium, Death Valley, we hold it sacred here — the players and the fans do as well. That was just a bad look, and we were part of it because they beat our behind and did what they did. We just felt like it was something we needed to correct.”

LSU did exactly that with a 27-14 win. But it didn’t just get that win; it got eight more after that. Auburn’s loss that day in 2001 was the first of what is now nine straight at Tiger Stadium. The 20-year anniversary of that last victory, on Sept. 18, 1999, came and went a little more than a month ago.

Auburn, ranked No. 10 in the USA Today coaches poll this season after a 6-1 start, will try to end that long drought in Death Valley on Saturday (2:30 p.m., CBS). No. 3 LSU, which is 7-0, enters a double-digit favorite.

“I guess you could call it ‘The curse of the cigar,’” Tuberville said.

The buildup to the rematch at Tiger Stadium actually started about 12 weeks earlier. Auburn and LSU were supposed to meet on Sept. 15, 2001. It would have been the third game of the regular season for each team.

But every game in the country was canceled that Saturday. It was four days after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, when hijacked airplanes crashed into both towers of the World Trade Center in New York City and the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., killing nearly 3,000 people.

Auburn’s players were on the practice field when it happened. One of the coaches announced to the team that the team that “we’re probably just going to be practicing just to get some reps in, because it doesn’t look like we’re going to be playing a game this weekend.” They found out why when they returned inside the complex.

“Everyone was just kind of shocked. You see the thing going across the screen that says, ‘The U.S. is under attack,’” Campbell recalled. “It was kind of hard to think about playing a game and playing football that week.”

Auburn didn’t play again until the following week, at Syracuse in upstate New York. Campbell remembers half the team not wanting to fly to that game, even though they would be taking a chartered jet. That was one of the few games the Laurel, Mississippi, native’s parents didn’t travel to — the wound was too fresh, and the fear all too real.

It ended up being one of the toughest games the quarterback said he has ever played in between four years at Auburn and 10 seasons in the NFL. And not because of the result — Auburn lost 31-14 — but because of the emotion in the building.

There were American flags waiting for fans on every seat inside the Carrier Dome. New York Gov. George Pataki addressed the crowd before kickoff, telling the crowd "the American people are stronger and stand more unified than ever before.” Families of victims and firefighters who were part of the rescue efforts at Ground Zero just days earlier were honored on the field before the game.

"The roar was deafening," longtime Syracuse.com sportswriter Donnie Webb wrote in 2011. "And the crowd joined in to sing the national anthem like never before. I had a lump in my throat and tears in my eyes trying to say the words to 'The Star-Spangled Banner' in the press box. It was a moment I’ll cherish and never forget."

Postponing Auburn-LSU from September to December raised the stakes significantly. Auburn entered the game with a 5-2 record in the SEC, and LSU was 4-3, which meant the game in Baton Rouge was going to determine who would win the West.

“It was a very focused week of preparation,” Davey said. “Leading up to the game, yeah, of course, we was like, ‘Yeah, we definitely got to get some get-back for smoking cigars. We’re going to have our cigars ready.’"

Tiger Stadium was charged up, too. Tuberville told his players it would be. “I’m probably going to be the biggest enemy down there this week because of what I did the last time,” Campbell recalls the coach saying.

And LSU fans and players weren’t the only people there who were angry. Auburn’s players didn’t love having their bus slapped and shaken and doused in debris, but it’s not as if they could get off and do anything about it. So, they waited until they got on the field.

Right at the end of pregame warm-ups, the visitors punted the ball toward midfield and had everyone converge on the return man, as they do before every game. Only this time, close to half the roster ran 10 yards farther than they had to so they could stomp on the Tiger Eye at midfield. It drew a 15-yard penalty.

“I guess we had some officials there that wanted to make a name for themselves,” Tuberville said.

Auburn won the coin toss and elected to receive the opening kickoff, even after the penalty. Tuberville warned his players that second-year LSU head coach Nick Saban might call for an onside kick from midfield. He even made a point to talk to the officials about watching for illegal downfield blocking if the kick was short.

His prediction was correct, but it didn’t matter: John Corbello popped the ball up into the air short and to the right, and Michael Clayton recovered it for the home team at the visitors’ 36-yard line.

Six plays later, running back LaBrandon Toefield plowed into the end zone for a 2-yard touchdown.

“They were dancing on the eye, I believe is what happened, and we didn’t walk out, we elected to take the penalty, kicked an onside and got it, went down and scored,” said current Texas A&M head coach Jimbo Fisher, who was LSU’s offensive coordinator at the time. “That really set them back and we took control of the game for the whole game from that point on.”

Auburn did actually match that score on its first drive, when Campbell hit Tim Carter down the right sideline for a 72-yard touchdown. But those proved to be the last points the visitors scored until the closing minutes of the fourth quarter.

Davey put LSU back on top with a 17-yard touchdown pass to Josh Reed early in the second quarter, Domanick Davis ran in from 7 yards out to make it a 14-point game just before halftime, and Corbello hit short field goals in the third and fourth quarters as part of the home team’s 20-0 run.

“It was 7-7 for a while. Then, all of a sudden, you know, the floodgates kind of opened. They ended up hitting some big plays and doing some big things against us. That’s a tough environment to play in, especially at nighttime,” Campbell said. “Because once their crowd gets into it, it’s like everything goes to a whole other level. It’s almost like they start to play different, everything starts to feel different. Of course, it’s a mindset, but when you’re at that age, you’re young kids, and young kids feed off emotion, feed off energy.”

Damon Duval can attest. The junior kicker’s contributions to that game include only a pair of extra points, a missed 29-yard field goal and six punts, but he’s forever a part of the story.

Toward the end of halftime, he came out onto the field like he always did and began warming up for the second half. LSU’s marching band was still on the field, but it was on the other side, so he started his normal progression — from extra point-length kicks to longer and longer field goals.

When the band finished playing and began walking off the field in his direction, Duval said he grabbed his things and moved off to one side of the field, far enough that he thought the band would be able to walk by him. Only it didn’t, and he ended up in an altercation with band members Mark Aycock and Joey LaHatte.

“One of the little guys hit me with his tuba. That just set me off. I ended up pushing him. Looking back now, of course, 20-20, I was young, had a little different attitude then,” Duval recalled this week. “It was a recipe for disaster to start. But they were saying stuff, and when I got hit with the tuba, I kind of lost my cool a little bit.”

Legend has it that Tuberville sent a letter to LSU band director Frank Wickes to apologize for Duval’s actions. But that wasn’t the only apology issued: A few years later, Duval said LSU actually formally apologized to him — the band was on the field past the time it was supposed to be.

“Knowing Duval, he don’t take nothing from nobody,” Campbell said. “So I can see him getting into it with the band.”

That wasn’t a game Tuberville is proud of. Not like the one Auburn played at LSU two years earlier, which he described as “one of the better games of my tenure in that rivalry.”

Auburn has had chances to win in Tiger Stadium since then, too. It went to overtime tied at 17 in 2005, led by six points with 3:21 remaining in 2007, and led 20-0 in the first half in 2017. It simply couldn’t finish any of those games.

In 2005, place-kicker John Vaughn, who hit the game-winning point after try in a 2004 victory at Jordan-Hare Stadium, missed five field goals at Tiger Stadium in a 20-17 loss, including one in overtime. In 2007, LSU quarterback Matt Flynn hit Demetrius Byrd for a game-winning 22-yard touchdown with one second remaining in a 30-24 win. In 2017, Auburn’s offense stalled for the entire second half, which allowed the home team to score 27 of the game’s final 30 points in a 27-23 victory.

“I’m about to turn 40 years old, and we’re going back to 1999. I was 19 years old the last time we won there. It’s hard to fathom that it’s been that long since we won,” Duval said. “Hopefully we can break that streak this week.”

If they don’t, Campbell — now part of Auburn’s radio broadcast crew — knows who to blame.

“I need to call Tubs and tell him, ‘You’re the reason Auburn has a 20-year ban on not winning down there,’” he joked.

Josh Vitale is the Auburn beat writer for the Montgomery Advertiser. You can follow him on Twitter at @JoshVitale. To reach him by email, click here.