Andrew McCain was on the sidelines when Auburn defeated Tim Tebow and eventual national champion Florida in 2006, when Tre Smith flipped into the end zone after a blocked punt and generated a deafening roar inside Jordan-Hare Stadium.

He was a starting offensive lineman three years later when Auburn, as a significant home underdog, raced out to an early lead against eventual national champion Alabama in the Iron Bowl.

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And, in his mind, there’s only one game that reaches the level of those two memorable home games against bitter rivals in terms of in-game atmosphere — a mid-September nonconference matchup against West Virginia in 2009.

“It ranks right up there as the loudest I ever heard the crowd during my time as a player,” McCain said.

To an outsider, that might seem out of place. It wasn’t an SEC game, and it didn’t come in an overly memorable season for Auburn. The Tigers went .500 the rest of the way after they defeated West Virginia, 41-30, on Sept. 19, 2009. Once Auburn climbed into the top 25 three weeks later, it immediately crashed out with a 44-23 loss at Arkansas.

Head coach Gene Chizik, offensive coordinator Gus Malzahn and the Tigers were still a year and a Cam Newton transfer away from a storybook run to a national championship. The 2009 Tigers finished with a losing record in league play.

But ask anyone who was inside Jordan-Hare Stadium exactly 10 years ago for Auburn vs. West Virginia, and they will tell you about one of the most memorable nights they ever experienced on the Plains.

“That was probably the game I cherish the most from my time at Auburn,” said Chris Todd, the Tigers’ starting quarterback during the 2009 season.

There’s a reason why a game between two unranked teams in an 8-5 season is still looked back upon this fondly — even for a program that would experience the “Kick Six,” the “Miracle at Jordan-Hare,” and back-to-back wins against No. 1-ranked rivals over the next decade.

And it all started with a whole lot of rain.

The Rain

Auburn was off to a 2-0 start in the 2009 season when it hosted West Virginia for a Week 3 night game. Behind Malzahn’s innovative hurry-up, no-huddle offense, Auburn had scored 86 combined points in wins against Louisiana Tech and Mississippi State.

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But West Virginia was set to be the first true big-game atmosphere inside Jordan-Hare Stadium that season. It was the first sellout, and it was the first opportunity for Auburn to get a greater national audience in an ESPN2 primetime game.

A year earlier, Auburn visited West Virginia for a Thursday night game in late October. The Tigers allowed 31 unanswered points after taking a 17-3 lead, and their third straight loss would spell doom for Tommy Tuberville. Auburn lost three of its final four games to finish the season at 5-7, and Tuberville would soon be replaced by Chizik, one of his former defensive coordinators.

“There was like this desperate sense of destiny about this game,” said Jeremy Henderson, who runs the popular Auburn website The War Eagle Reader. “But we had gotten beaten so badly the year before that it was like, ‘OK, this is our chance at revenge.’ We’ve been winning. It’s a new season. A new era has dawned. There was a strong hunger for revenge. Auburn had a new hope and needed to keep it rolling.”

The gameday forecast in Auburn on Sept. 19, 2009, called for a 50 percent chance of rain. The scheduled 6:45 p.m. kickoff time meant fans had extra time to take advantage of the clear skies and pleasant weather for most of the day.

“It was gorgeous, like, not that long before the game,” said Dan Peck, a sports radio host in Auburn. “It was a normal tailgating day. Everybody was out. And that probably did more damage, because people didn’t really prepare for what was coming.”

The clouds started to roll in a few hours before kickoff. Auburn rerouted its normal Tiger Walk path down South Donahue Drive to a shortened journey off the team buses and quickly across Heisman Drive.

“I remember thinking, ‘I don’t see why the weather is affecting that much already,’” said Jack Condon, who was a student worker for Auburn’s radio network at the time. “Looking back, it was an early sign of what was going to be a super weird night.”

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As Auburn fans filed into Jordan-Hare Stadium, the skies went from partly cloudy to overcast to downright ominous.

“I remember walking into the stadium and looking up and seeing probably the darkest cloud I had ever seen,” said Graham Carr, an Auburn fan seated in the student section that night. “And I was just like, wow. We’re gonna be in some trouble.”

Toward the end of pregame warmups, the rain began. The sprinkles grew to a shower as the two teams left the field, then the bottom fell out of the sky.

Over the next hour, nearly four inches of rain fell on Jordan-Hare Stadium. And that much precipitation in that amount of time meant it was coming down with plenty of force.

“I don’t know how to explain it, other than the rain would actually hurt you,” Carr said. “That’s how hard it was coming down. Even if you had a poncho or anything like that, it didn’t do anything for you.”

The pitch-black skies that dumped the rain onto the sellout crowd also came with lightning. Jordan-Hare Stadium public address announcer Ric Smith soon delivered the news that the game was in a weather delay.

Inside the Auburn locker room, coaches told players to take off their shoulder pads. The room’s televisions, which were normally used just for pregame videos, were turned to the Georgia-Arkansas game that had just kicked off on ESPN.

“I was doing what I would normally be doing on a Saturday if I wasn’t playing at the time — I was just watching college football,” Todd said with a laugh. “I was sitting in a chair with my feet propped up in another chair. It was pretty relaxing.”

The atmosphere outside the locker room was completely different. It only took a couple of minutes for fans to get drenched from head to toe.

“You couldn’t even see the other side of the stadium, it was that much of a downpour,” Condon said.

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For safety reasons, Auburn asked fans to leave the metal bleachers and take shelter in the stadium’s concourse. And, if they wanted to leave the stadium, they would be allowed back inside once the delay was over.

Some people quickly made their way out, or at least tried to get to the concourse. But those in Auburn’s student section — and, surprisingly enough, West Virginia’s band — didn’t budge.

“Once it starts raining that heavily, there’s really no escaping it,” said Henderson, who stayed out in the stands during the hour-long delay. “Then it was like everybody was in on this big joke. It was a point of pride. The whole student section, even when they found out they could leave and come back, was like, ‘Nah, forget that. We’re braving the elements. We’re here for our team. We’re gonna show the world that Auburn fans are hardcore.’ It was like, bring it on.”

The heaviest rain fell in a half-hour stretch. Cell phones were immediately ruined. Escaping was impossible, useless or incomprehensible for many in the student section — so they had to make the most of it.

During the delay, the sound system inside Jordan-Hare Stadium blared song after song, several of which had some sort of rain theme.

The most memorable one was “Have You Ever Seen the Rain?” by Creedence Clearwater Revival, and Auburn students belted out the chorus in unison as the flooding continued.

On the Auburn radio broadcast, Rod Bramblett said the scene was more like Woodstock than a college football game. Beach balls were batted around in the stands. Security even let some students onto the field to dance in the end zone as the music continued.

Underneath the student section, Auburn players were impressed with what they heard.

“I remember hearing rumblings of the crowd in the locker room,” McCain said. “Honestly, that was one of maybe two or three times that ever happened. All those students refused to leave and were just singing and jumping around. It was a strange sensation. We’re delayed and in here, but it sounds like there’s a football game going on out there.”

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Those who were stuck in the concourse weren’t completely avoiding the rain, either. Due to the stadium’s design, rain flowed down the ramps to the jam-packed area underneath the bleachers. Makeshift rivers ensured anyone down there would at least get their shoes soaked.

“There was water just gushing through there,” said Brett Walker, a late-arriving student section fan who managed to get to the concourse before the heavy rain began. “You still got wet, even if you weren’t totally out there in it.”

After a little more than an hour, the lightning and the worst of the rain had passed. The drainage system underneath the field at Jordan-Hare Stadium had done a remarkable job, and what had been sizable pools of water less than an hour earlier were gone.

Auburn, amazingly enough, was going to play a football game after the stadium took on 3.75 inches of rain in a short amount of time.

In the record books, the official attendance for the game was 87,451 — a capacity crowd for Jordan-Hare Stadium. But Auburn might have been well past that number once the game actually began.

“When they started to put the game back on, they didn’t require you to show a ticket to get back in,” Condon said. “So the student section got even more packed than it was before. The stadium had to be over capacity for that game. People who were tailgating and didn’t have tickets were trying to squeeze in there. It was slammed.

“Everybody just got super frothed up from sitting in the rain. It was like, ‘We’re already out here, and we’re as wet as we could possibly be. I don’t really care what happens, I’m gonna have a rough time tomorrow anyway. I’ll just lose my voice, too.’”

The Game

The hour-plus of waiting in the torrential rain only seemed to intensify the atmosphere inside Jordan-Hare Stadium. Before the Tigers ran out of the tunnel and onto the field, they took a moment to recognize the fans who hung in there.

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“That was everything,” McCain said. “You’re always stoked to play, but we had gone up to Morgantown a year prior and just put up a lackluster showing on both sides of the ball. We felt like we owed those guys. We were always going to be up for a game, but having your crowd stick through a delay that felt so long for us — and we were dry, inside and watching TV — gets you so amped up as a player.

“It brings that extra level of effort and want-to out of you when you see how much it meant to that many people.”

But all that rain was only the first storm Auburn had to endure on that Saturday night. The second one was a 5-foot-8 running back named Noel Devine.

A year earlier in Morgantown, Devine had rushed for 207 yards on just 17 carries next to the mercurial quarterback Pat White, who threw for three touchdowns. White was no longer with the Mountaineers, but Devine was back to torment Auburn’s defense once more.

On the third play of the game, new West Virginia quarterback Jarrett Brown scrambled and hit Bradley Starks for a 58-yard gain. Devine punched it in two plays later. Then, after a short opening drive from Auburn, Devine broke free for a 71-yard touchdown run.

Less than five minutes into the game, Auburn trailed West Virginia, 14-0. The Mountaineers had scored 45 unanswered points on the Tigers, dating back to their 2008 meeting.

“It was intense for us,” Todd said. “The fans stayed through all of that and are absolutely drenched, and then West Virginia jumps out on us early. That had to be so frustrating, man.”

What followed was what Todd described as a brilliant chess match between Malzahn and West Virginia defensive coordinator Jeff Casteel.

Malzahn’s first move was to go away from what had been a strong, Ben Tate-led running game in the opening two weeks and find ways to attack the Mountaineers’ 3-3-5 defense by throwing the ball more — even on a wet night.

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“There was a lot of give and take,” Todd said. “It was this high-low thing — they’d drop back, we’d hit them underneath with Eric Smith, Tommy Trott or Onterio McCalebb. They’d come up, we’d go back over the top with Darvin Adams or Terrell Zachary. We played around with some things on the outside, even doing some high-low stuff on the sidelines as well. We were taking what we got from them, because they had a great defense.”

Defensively, Auburn followed up its own field goal drive by forcing the first of what would be six West Virginia turnovers. A strip sack turned into a quick touchdown. When West Virginia responded with another touchdown and an interception of Todd inside his own red zone, Auburn got the ball right back with a pick of its own.

“The defense bailed us out a few times,” McCain said. “We had a great offense at the beginning of the season, just a buzzsaw going through folks, but that was the first time in that 2009 season when we had to really lean on the defense.”

Auburn engineered another field goal and another passing touchdown from Todd to Darvin Adams before halftime. After being down two scores quickly, the Tigers only trailed by one point heading back into the locker room.

“I remember we were down at the half and still thinking, like, we still had it,” Henderson said. “It was exactly how I felt at the Iron Bowl the next year. We were still, somehow, going to win this thing. The rain kind of played into it, too. It was like, God’s not going to let some awesome memory like this be wasted on a loss. No one’s going to talk about ‘The Rain Game’ if it was a loss. That would’ve sucked. You don’t christen losses.

“You, as a fan, wanted to have the badge of honor of sitting through the monsoon the night Auburn came back and beat West Virginia.”

West Virginia scored right after halftime with a 12-yard touchdown run from Devine but missed the extra point. That set the stage for Auburn to tie the game at 27 with a memorable pass from Todd to running back Mario Fannin.

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“On TV, it looked like an easy throw,” Todd said. “I had a reverse out on a play-action sweep, and the d-end was right in my face. I had to fall backwards and throw it sidearm, and I couldn’t even see Mario. It just happened to hit him in stride, and he made, like, seven guys miss.”

Fannin’s catch-and-run score from 82 yards out was followed up by a West Virginia field goal — but it would be the last points of the game from the visiting Mountaineers.

Early in the fourth quarter, Brown sent a shovel pass that was too high for Devine. The deflection off the speedy back’s fingertips landed right in the hands of Auburn defensive lineman Jake Ricks. Three plays later, Auburn took its first lead of the night with Todd’s third touchdown pass of the game to Adams.

“We just kept battling and responding,” Todd said. “A lot of people had to come up big for us to win that game, and they did.”

Afterward, several Mountaineers told reporters that the volume of the fans played a huge factor in the second half.

It definitely showed, as West Virginia threw interceptions in a span of four drives.

“It felt like a conference game,” Peck said. “When that game got to the fourth quarter, the crowd really made life difficult on West Virginia. That was a crowd that was ready to do whatever it took to help Auburn win.”

But the game was still in doubt with less than four minutes to play and Auburn only leading by four points. The Mountaineers dialed up a middle screen, but the Tigers — and more specifically, linebacker Craig Stevens — were waiting for it. Stevens cut off the pass, tipped it to himself, and went 15 yards for a game-sealing touchdown.

“We had a feeling they were going to run the screen sometime during that series, so I ended up going on a blitz that play,” Stevens told reporters after the game. “He lobbed it just enough for me to tip it and I got it in my hands. Once I got in my hands, I had to get in the end zone.”

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For those in attendance, Stevens’ pick-six was the stadium-rattling moment that sent the West Virginia game into the upper echelon of Auburn home games. This was the 2009 Tigers’ version of the Tre Smith punt block touchdown in 2006 or the Nick Marshall-to-Ricardo Louis heave in 2013.

“It felt like the student section just exploded,” Walker said.

“To get a comeback like that and slam the door on West Virginia with all those turnovers — it was pure pandemonium,” Carr said.

“Where I was, halfway up in the end zone, you had about 10 rows of students jumping up and down on wet bleachers, which led to a lot of slipping and falling and this big tangled mess,” Condon said. “But nobody cared.”

Now down by 11 points, West Virginia sent in a young Geno Smith to relieve Brown. On a fourth-and-3 with 2:28 left, Smith threw an interception of his own, putting any hope of a miracle comeback out of reach.

And when the clock hit all zeroes for the 41-30 win minutes later, Auburn’s players immediately knew what they needed to do.

“You want to go to the other team after the game and be gracious in victory as much as you would be in defeat,” McCain said. “But it was on everybody’s mind — and we even talked about it as the game was ending — to go over there and thank our students for being such a huge part of this game. That was just incredible.

“They stuck it out through all that just to watch a football game.”

The Legacy

Chizik provided one of the lasting soundbites from “The Rain Game” in his postgame news conference when he began his opening statement by saluting the crowd that helped push his team over the finish line.

“I wish I had 87,000 game balls, because our fans were a huge reason why we won that game,” Chizik said. “I want them to know that.”

For many of those fans who stayed through the storm and the final whistle, it probably felt like they had played the game themselves.

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That created a different kind of post-win atmosphere in Auburn. Toomer’s Corner was still rolled, of course. But not very many people were hanging around to party afterward.

“If Auburn kicks at 6, downtown is going to be mobbed after the game and packed until last call,” Peck said. “But this time, a lot of people were like, ‘Yeah, we’ll go roll Toomer’s, but then we’re going home. We’re going to go take a shower, go dry off, go to sleep.’ It was a muted celebration because everybody was just worn out. You had spent hours either fighting for space out in the concourse or standing in the rain singing Bon Jovi — and that was before you expended even more energy during the actual game.”

The game had lingering effects, though, for the next couple of days on the Plains. All the water damage done to the cell phones of those in the student section meant lines out the door at the Verizon and AT&T stores in Auburn. The waits were so long that some students chose to drive back to their hometowns in order to get a new phone.

And the collective misery of the delay that turned into the collective joy of the victory meant tales were going to be told from the game indefinitely.

“There was this anticipation of getting together with everyone and sharing war stories from it,” Henderson said. “‘How long did you stay out there? Did you get out in time?’ That kind of thing.”

For Auburn and its fan base, rallying from an early two-touchdown deficit to knock off West Virginia — and get revenge — was the first signature win under Chizik. Louisiana Tech and Mississippi State were teams with losing records in 2009. West Virginia would go on to finish 9-4 with a top-25 spot in the final AP Poll.

“I think that game really ushered in the Chizik era,” Walker said. “People were on the fence about him when he was hired. I mean, you had that guy there at the airport, yelling ‘5-19’ at (athletic director) Jay Jacobs. But after that night, when we put 41 points up on what we thought was a good team — and came back from being down a significant amount — I think it changed things.

“And I’ll always remember just how much fun everybody had in that one. A lot of these September games, it’s always so hot, and everybody just looks miserable. But I look back fondly at that West Virginia game as a real Auburn moment. We were all in it like one big family, and it hasn’t always felt that way.”

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Auburn has had its fair share of memorable home games since then. It’s seen miracle finishes, division-clinching upsets and truly jaw-dropping individual efforts.

But Auburn vs. West Virginia in 2009 was a perfect storm of bizarre pregame circumstances, still-intact fan optimism, dramatic on-field action and deafening moments of crowd noise. It was a music festival, a test of endurance and a delightfully chaotic back-and-forth football game all rolled into one.

It was a unique blend of entertainment that only college football could provide.

“That might be No. 1 for me in terms of Auburn games where I’ve had the most fun,” Carr said. “With many big games like that, you get so nervous, and you really can’t enjoy it. I think the rain and the delay took the nerves out of it for the fans. We were kind of going into it like, ‘Well, whatever happens, happens. I’ve already lost a phone for this.’ We could just enjoy the game.”

The same could be said for those in the Auburn locker room, minus the dead cell phones. After a losing season in 2008, the Tigers were having fun playing football again.

“I remember some of the touchdowns, when guys were really jacked up to go down the field and celebrate with their teammates,” Todd said. “The linemen were going nuts with the skill guys. We were losing it on the sidelines when the defense made plays. It was a game that really solidified us as a team.”

Although the victory didn’t immediately turn Auburn into a championship contender in 2009, that type of quick-strike offense and opportunistic defense were both key characteristics of what it would become in 2010 — along with the ability to bounce back from sizable deficits and come up big in the clutch.

The Tigers’ 2010 national championship squad won seven of their 14 games by a single possession. It came back from 17 down against Clemson, 14 down against Georgia and, rather famously, 24 down against Alabama.

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The quarterback and the spotlight on the team might have been different the next year, but the road to that national title began with nearly four inches of rain and a nonconference game between two unranked teams that Auburn fans still talk about a decade later.

“We had a lot of games in 2008 where we were right in the thick of it and just couldn’t get over the hump,” McCain said. “The story of 2009 was that team learned how to win those games. I think it started there against West Virginia, just learning to battle through that adversity. And hey, no matter what the scoreboard says, let’s just worry about what we do. We’ve got the guys to get it done. And that helped that 2010 team over the hump.

“You hear a whole lot of coachspeak, but learning how to win the close ones is a real thing. And I think that we learned how to do it that night.”

(Top photo: Kevin C. Cox / Getty Images)