Auburn’s student section, affectionately known as The Jungle, first saw tents pitched immediately after Auburn basketball’s lopsided win over South Carolina on Wednesday night.

Since then, the line of tents and camping chairs has continued to weave through Auburn’s campus with the front of the line at the backdoors of Auburn’s Neville Arena.

“Well, just like any other Friday afternoon here on the Plains, Jay Bilas is on the main floor and there are 1,000 kids camping out in Jungleville — I call it Jungleville,” Auburn head coach Bruce Pearl said. “You can feel the energy on campus. College GameDay is here. Kentucky’s in town.”

Auburn is set to host what Pearl calls the “gold standard” of SEC basketball in John Calipari and the Kentucky Wildcats on Saturday night at 5 p.m., meaning some members of the Auburn student section will have been camped out for more than 60 hours come tipoff.

“That’s crazy,” Auburn fifth-year senior Jaylin Williams said of The Jungle’s commitment, adding that the only camping he’s ever done was in the woods as a kid. “I don’t think I would ever.”

Meanwhile, Auburn sophomore Tre Donaldson — a Florida native — says he’s never gone camping.

“Can’t do it. Can’t do it,” Donaldson joked. “You can’t camp in Florida.”

As for Pearl, he’s done some camping in his time, just never the type of camping The Jungle is doing.

“As a kid we camped out. That was a lot of fun. We camped out more than just in some neighbor’s backyard. We’d go walk a trail and hangout and campout,” Pearl said. “I enjoyed that. I don’t know that I’ve ever — I’ve never camped out for a ballgame.”

However, that said, Pearl says he did spend some time as a college student doing some extra work to get students involved.

When Pearl was a student at Boston College, he was in charge of getting student buses to go to the Big East Tournament.

“We did get one bus to go to Bloomington, Indiana, that I organized,” Pearl said. “Brought some students, as a student, out to an NCAA Tournament. It was actually a regional in Bloomington. I didn’t travel with the team on that trip. Coach Davis had me organize a bus trip. That’s the closest thing I think I’ve ever gotten to camping out.”

Now, not to discredit the efforts of Pearl in organizing getting a bus of students from Newton, Mass. to Bloomington, Ind., but it doesn’t quite equate to the dedication Auburn’s students are currently putting on display.

And as crazy as it all appears, having so many students camp out on the sidewalk in the days leading up to Saturday’s game against Kentucky carries a deeper meaning for Auburn’s players.

“Just shows that it’s a family here, Auburn’s a family,” said Williams. “They don’t see us as just athletes, they see us as humans. They just want to support us and show us how proud they are of us and I feel like that’s a way of doing it.”