UNIVERSITY PARK, Texas -- Wailing is reverberating across this great nation as the rude awakening of conference realignment threatens to rip the heart out of the very fiber of college football tradition -- the rivalry game.

Nebraska-Oklahoma is history. Texas-Texas A&M, a rivalry born in 1894, is headed the way of the turkey on Thanksgiving Day. The backyard brawl pitting bitter neighbors Pittsburgh and West Virginia is headed for the hills.

BYU and Utah played this season as non-conference rivals for the first time in 113 years and in September as opposed to ski season for the first time in 53 years. After 2012, the game goes dark until 2016.

Ah, but find solace and reason to rejoice college football fans. All is not lost. The great rivalry is not dead.

The near-century-old Battle of the Skillet, TCU vs. SMU, is on and is as heated as ever, which many know hasn't always been all that heated.

Although the schools went their separate ways -- not by choice -- when the grand old Southwest Conference dissolved, the two religious-based private schools 40 miles apart keep making the cross-town trek to knock heads.

The rivalry resumes at 2:30 p.m. Saturday in Fort Worth between two 3-1 teams prior to crucial conference games for each. It is the 92nd meeting of a once moribund series that is growing in stature and local interest on both ends of the Metroplex thanks to TCU's national emergence and next season's membership into a BCS conference, and SMU's deep-seeded desire to do the same.