If you needed a metaphor for what has become of the TCU–SMU rivalry, once one of the best in college football, consider the trophy that’s on the line Saturday. The Iron Skillet itself is not what we think it is.

The two schools, 40 miles apart, were once football royalty, Southwest Conference enemies playing with national championships on the line. Now, after multiple rounds of realignment, after NIL and revenue sharing and a path to the playoff became a priority, a rivalry is playing its final scheduled game. Disdain is not a business model anymore, unfortunately, for fans who long to feel it in their hearts.

The Horned Frogs and Mustangs first met in 1915, and within 20 years, the 1935 game was known as the “Game of the Century,” an SMU win so thrilling that legendary sportswriter Grantland Rice, who rode the train from New York to cover it, considered it perhaps the greatest game ever played in the first 60 years of the sport.

By 1946, the rivalry was so bitter that the two schools, both of which had suffered vandalism on campus by opposing students, apparently decided that the thing that would stop all the shenanigans would be to create a trophy the winner could hold for a year. And that thing was a pan. The Iron Skillet rivalry was born, inspired by Michigan and Minnesota‘s battle for the Little Brown Jug.

But over the years, the tradition faded, teams stopped handing it over to each other and the original was lost. In 1993, both schools’ student governments resurrected the tradition, and an iron skillet adorned with a plaque became a trophy once again. But a nod to the past couldn’t inspire much more than nostalgia: The Frogs went 4-7 that season and SMU finished 2-7-2. These were the dark days of a once-great series. TCU, which won more games (90) than any other major school in the country from 1929 through 1938, would be ranked in the AP poll just twice between 1961 and 1999.

SMU, which produced a Heisman Trophy winner in the great Doak Walker in 1948, fell into mediocrity, then roared back to prominence in the Pony Express days of the 1980s, finishing in the top 10 three times between 1981 and 1984. But after the NCAA’s hammer fell on the Mustangs and they were given the “death penalty” for repeated recruiting violations, SMU did not play any games during the 1987 and 1988 seasons and would not be ranked again until 2019. The two never came close to peaking at the same time, except in 2011, when June Jones’ 8-5 SMU team beat Gary Patterson’s 11-2 Frogs, who were coming off a 2010 Rose Bowl win, 40-33 in overtime.

By 2018, TCU had kept possession of the Skillet for 15 of the past 17 seasons, including the previous seven. When a staffer went to retrieve it for the 2018 game, the rusted pan had broken at the handle. Sources, under condition of anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the covert kitchenware operation, have revealed that the current Iron Skillet is an impostor, a Lodge cast iron pan bought at an Ace True Value hardware store (retail value: $49.99) shortly before the game, and fitted with the engraved nameplate.

It’s an appropriate representation of the reverence that the Frogs had for the rivalry during all those lean years. TCU had ascended from the leftovers of the Southwest Conference to move to the Big 12 in 2012 while the Mustangs lingered in the WAC, Conference USA and the AAC.

Still, they played, because it was a rivalry fueled by spite at the school and city levels. Nationally, Dallas and Fort Worth are lumped together, but for most of their history, they’ve wanted nothing to do with each other. And that was especially true for Fort Worth, and more specifically for one Amon G. Carter, the city’s biggest booster who founded the Fort Worth Star-Telegram in 1906.

So it’s only fitting that when SMU and TCU meet Saturday (noon ET, ESPN2) for the last time (as far as anyone knows), that it will be played at the Frogs’ Amon G. Carter Stadium.

Carter, known as “Mr. Fort Worth,” had such contempt for Dallas that he would pack a brown-bag lunch for his sojourns to Big D so that he didn’t spend any of his money there. He was so incensed that Dallas was awarded the Texas Centennial in 1935 that he successfully lobbied his friend, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, to use New Deal-era funds to build a coliseum in Fort Worth so that he could put on his own centennial celebration.

“Fort Worth responded by erecting the world’s second-largest sign opposite the main entrance of Dallas’ exposition,” wrote D Magazine, a Dallas publication. “The green and red neon sign was one hundred and thirty feet long, sixty feet high and its message blinked day and night: WILD & WHOO-PEE 45 MINUTES WEST, FORT WORTH FRONTIER. Fort Worth was spelled out in green neon letters seventeen and one-half feet tall. The sign was second in size only to a chewing gum display overlooking Times Square.”

The two cities celebrate their differences. Fort Worth is “Where the West Begins” and “Cowtown,” a working-man’s city where they wore cowboy boots that got dirty. Dallas always had aspired to be a business center built more like the East Coast power centers, where boots were a status symbol. Fort Worth’s nickname of “Panther City” was embraced as a thumb in the eye of a snobby Dallas lawyer who, in 1875, said that Fort Worth’s downtown was so boring that he’d seen a panther napping there.

So on Nov. 30, 1935, when a national championship was on the line in the Iron Skillet, the frenzy around the game reached a level that equaled any rivalry matchup in history.

Amon G. Carter Stadium held 22,500 seats at that time, and by every account of the contest, between 36,000-40,000 fans crashed the gates and crowded into the place to see No. 1 SMU and No. 6 TCU, both undefeated, play for a trip to the Rose Bowl. Previously, no Texas team had ever been invited, and fans were so desperate to witness it that tickets were resold for as much as $100, equivalent to about $2,350 today, and the game was broadcast nationwide on NBC radio. SMU won 20-14 in a game far ahead of its time.

The Mustangs, led by Bobby Wilson, a consensus All-American running back, held off the Horned Frogs and the advanced aerial attack of coach Dutch Meyer helmed by Slingin’ Sammy Baugh (who, that year, led the College All-Stars to victory over the Green Bay Packers and became an NFL All-Pro as a rookie while leading Washington to the NFL title). It also ignited a lifelong fascination for a young fan, 6-year-old Dan Jenkins, who sat in the stands and fell in love with college football before becoming one of the great writers of the game.

“Pro football consisted largely of a group of second-class citizens waddling around in the baseball parks of blue-collar cities,” Jenkins wrote in a 1981 issue of Sports Illustrated. “Not until my first car date years later did I experience anything as thrilling as the Saturday afternoon of Nov. 30, 1935. It was the day TCU and SMU played a football game of such monumental dimensions that my dad took the precaution of bringing an extra flask of ‘cough medicine’ to the stadium.”

Jenkins, who died at 90 in 2019, recalled it as a game of “unbearable importance.” To Fort Worth and Dallas, he said, “the game meant something more: bragging rights for all eternity.”

SMU earned those rights, surviving Baugh’s 43 passes, which Jenkins wrote was “unheard of among civilized people.” The school newspaper, the Semi-Weekly Campus, celebrated the win as “the greatest exhibition of football, no holds barred, that ever hit the Southwest; perhaps the greatest ever given in the country. Rice stated after the game that he had never seen anything to equal it.”

For SMU, saddled with debt amid the depression after building its own on-campus stadium, the victory was a lifeline, potentially saving its athletic programs, according to “One Hundred Years on the Hilltop: The Centennial History of Southern Methodist University,” by Darwin Payne.

“SMU’s share of the Rose Bowl proceeds [from the January 1936 game against Stanford] was $78,183. The successful football season that drew large crowds had already boosted dividends to $88,292, some $24,000 more than expected. SMU’s trustees happily paid off the worrisome $85,000 note on Ownby Stadium and had money left over.”

And that leads back to why we are where we are today: The two schools, fighting for their athletics futures in an era defined by NIL and revenue sharing, are caught in a numbers game. In the modern era, the rivalry has too few fans — TCU has about 103,000 living alumni, SMU 140,000 — and for decades, they were mired in mediocrity.

For many years, there were no national broadcasts for either university. SMU was crushed by the NCAA in 1987, two years after TCU’s coach, Jim Wacker, turned his own team in to the NCAA for boosters’ payments and lost 35 scholarships and two years of television revenue, devastating sanctions for a program that had won just 18 games between 1973 and 1983, including four one-win seasons. The Southwest Conference fizzled and popped, and the teams fell on hard times. SMU, embarrassed by its reckoning after pursuing big-time athletics, decided to purposely marginalize football and not prioritize funding or realignment as TCU did. After football returned to campus — and old Ownby Stadium — in 1989, SMU won one or zero games seven times in the next 20 seasons, finishing .500 or better just twice in those two decades, once in 1997 and again in 2006. That year, the Daily Campus wrote that the average student attendance at home football games was between 1,500 and 2,500 students, an issue that has long plagued the Ponies.

Amon G. Carter Stadium, meanwhile, would not host another top-10 matchup after that 1935 thriller until 2014, when Bill Snyder’s brought his No. 7 Kansas State team to face Patterson’s No. 6 Frogs. TCU won that game 41-20, showing that its ambitions were oriented higher than toward Dallas. The damage was done, and apathy reigned as Patterson dominated the series. In 2000, his first year as a head coach, he led TCU to a 62-7 win over SMU and then went 16-4 against the Mustangs.

Ironically, the only reason the series became a rivalry again in recent years was because of the arrival of Sonny Dykes at SMU in 2018. He beat Patterson in their last two meetings, including a 41-38 triumph in 2019 in Fort Worth (claiming the new Lodge skillet) and a 42-34 victory in 2021 in Fort Worth (the 2020 game in Dallas was canceled due to COVID). Afterward, Patterson went on a tirade, saying SMU players had hit assistant coach Jerry Kill with a helmet and knocked him down, which was disproven by video, showing Kill had tripped. Suddenly, there was some drama again in the ol’ Skillet.

Patterson was fired that fall, and TCU turned to Dykes, who would’ve made Carter proud by bolting the Hilltop for purpler pastures — at the time, TCU was in a power conference and SMU was still searching for a seat at the table. Dykes beat SMU and his former offensive coordinator, Rhett Lashlee, the first two times he played them. Then last year, SMU blew out TCU 66-42 and Dykes was ejected because of two unsportsmanlike conduct calls, much to the delight of the SMU fans who had packed the place.

“When I got over to SMU … there just didn’t seem to be a lot of juice from the players for it, so we tried to play it up to a degree and we had some success and then it kind of became more of a rivalry,” Dykes said Tuesday.

Dykes knew what the game meant to SMU, because he had lived it. It was their one shot to take down a big league team. After 2022, when the Frogs beat Michigan in the Fiesta Bowl and made it to the national championship game, the school and former athletic director Jeremiah Donati instead focused on scheduling nonconference games that brought in revenue to build the department. Playing an away game at SMU every other year suddenly didn’t seem to make sense anymore. Fans might want to play rivalry games, but playoff runs are what keep coaches and administrators employed.

The sport has changed, and so then does the calculus, even after SMU landed a spot in the ACC in 2023 and became a Power 4 team on TCU’s level again last season. But the reality is that Big 12 and ACC teams don’t get the benefit of the doubt that SEC and Big Ten teams do, so every loss is magnified.

Even Lashlee, who suffered a 48-45 overtime loss to Baylor earlier this season, another sentimental nonconference regional matchup that fans appreciate, seemed to agree with that logic Tuesday, pointing to Clemson‘s seven-point loss to No. 3 LSU, and how large it looms after the Tigers dropped an ACC game to Georgia Tech.

“Rivalries are what made our sport awesome,” Lashlee said. “It’s what made TV want to cover our sport. And then the irony of it is TV is somewhat hurting rivalries. Now you’re putting schools in a position. If we still want big-time nonconference games, we better make it more accessible to get in the playoff because if you’ve got to play nine conference games and it’s all a popularity contest, does it benefit you to go lose a marquee nonconference game?”

Soon, the Iron Skillet will become like other rivalries lost to realignment, financial and playoff complications such as Pitt–Penn State, schools which have met 100 times, but just four times since 2000, from 2016 to 2019, and Oklahoma–Nebraska (88 total meetings, but just two since 2010). Cincinnati and Louisville, separated by 100 miles, played for the Keg of Nails trophy from 1966 to 2013 but have met just once since the Cardinals moved to the ACC, in the Fenway Bowl in 2022.

It’ll likely go the way the hiatus went between Texas and Texas A&M after the Aggies left for the SEC, with fans of the two constantly calling each other cowards or insisting their schedules were full — TCU says it is until 2032 — while rival fans consistently chirp at each other on social media, debating who would win if they actually lined up. The San Antonio Express-News called the Aggies-Longhorns feud the “dumbest rivalry in college sports” when they didn’t play for 13 years until Texas joined the SEC.

We have one last chance to witness history. The game won’t have much of a bearing on either team’s season, with a 12-team playoff leaving a window open for the loser, other than maybe making SMU’s path more fraught.

But Jenkins would agree that as the last one, this game will mean something more: bragging rights for all eternity. Or at least until another round of realignment reunites them.