We set foot on Auburn's campus bright and early, about 9:30 AM, on a beautiful, breezy afternoon to talk to students about Alabama.

"Yeah, it's beautiful here," Kacy Hairell said, "but if you were to go to Tuscaloosa, I mean, it would just be like - you'd be like this," she said as she held her nostrils shut with her fingers.

She insisted that I'd better bring nose plugs to UA's campus.

"Seriously, the town smells," Hairell said. "Like, sewage smells. Not just like their football team smells, but like sewer smells."

Oh this was going to be a fun day.

Alley Jackson looked like the sweetest girl on campus, so we asked her for an interview. She stopped being sweet once the Tide was brought up.

"I hate Alabama because they still worship someone who's dead," she immediately said.

Then we saw a studious young man sitting on a bench who turned out to be a Tuscaloosa native attending Auburn. As a child, it took Ralph Wood some time to figure out who the good guys were, but he now knows they wear blue and orange.

So I asked Ralph, someone who obviously grew up on this rivalry, what I can expect on Saturday.

"Since it's in Tuscaloosa this year," he told me, "you can expect a lot of crazy folks."

What does he hate about Alabama?

"They're so focused on the past. The number 12 (the amount of Alabama National Championships) is magical to them, for some reason. All them fans wearing them Bear Bryant hats aggravate me."

Emily, always looking to make friends, walked through campus yelling "Go to hell Alabama!"

She got a, "Damn straight!" She heard a few, "War Eagles!"

That's when I decided to take a risk. Here I am at Auburn, and I had to be that guy. I looked at a few strangers and said, "Go Alabama!"

No joke ... someone flipped me the bird (and it sure was not a War Eagle). It was time to leave.

Back to the car. After lunch, several more hours of driving, and a quick check-in at the hotel, we entered UA and attended the last few minutes of Alabama football practice.

My boys are lookin' good.

Hunger had set in, so we dined with the students at a local restaurant and told them we had just heard some Auburn trash talk. Let's see what you Alabama folk are made of.

"They're pretty arrogant," Michael Waller said of Auburn. "They think they've got a dynasty going on. Their coach is about the most arrogant person I know."

Then, he got personal.

"Most of their fans are - they call themselves 'diehards' - but, you know, when they lose, you don't see them around."

He kept going.

"The reason why they don't want to talk about tradition is they have none."

We were slightly concerned about bringing Emily into the restaurant, or the city for that matter, but the Alabama fans behaved very nicely. Emily talked to Nicholas Beckham about his feelings for Auburn.

"Well," he said, "I have a lot of friends that go to Auburn. So, I mean, I don't want to say I outright hate them or anything. I mean some of them are kind of discourteous. Some of them are not real intelligent."

We asked these two what the Iron Bowl will be like.

"A lot of noise," Beckham said. "A lot of booing."

Waller has already been to one Iron Bowl. It's an experience he'll never forget.

"It's insane. I was here in 2004 when Auburn was ranked very high, and we played them. I have never heard a stadium or a group of people so loud in my life. It was just deafening, and it was true college sports."

Whether you're an Auburn fan or an Alabama fan, it's easy to agree with Beckham on that one. This rivalry is what college sports is all about.