TCU running back Jeremy Payne (26) celebrates with the "iron skillet", after the team's win against SMU in an NCAA college football game, Saturday, Sept. 20, 2025, in Fort Worth, Texas. (AP Photo/Tony Gutierrez)

FORT WORTH, Texas (AP) — Now that TCU has won the final game scheduled against SMU in the 110-year-old rivalry, coach Sonny Dykes and the Horned Frogs can pretty much do whatever they want with the trophy.

“Probably get a sledgehammer and break it,” Dykes joked when asked after the Horned Frogs' 35-24 win Saturday what will happen to the Iron Skillet, a replacement to the original trophy that broke several years ago. “I don't know. Our players have it right now and they're excited about it. We took a picture, now we'll probably cook something in it.”

Dykes was on the winning side five of the last six times the “Battle for the Iron Skillet” was played between the former Southwest Conference rivals. He first got back-to-back victories while coaching SMU before moving 40 miles across the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex to take over as TCU’s coach after the 2021 season, and going 3-1 against SMU.

The decision by TCU to not continue the series was made after Dykes moved west, and before SMU joined the Atlantic Coast Conference to be in a major league for the first time since the SWC's final season in 1995.

“It’s college football. It’s business, and people have to make business decisions and sometimes nobody likes them,” Dykes said. “I think the idea is coach Dykes is scared of the Iron Skillet game. ... Five out of six ain't bad. So, yeah, I ain't too scared.”

TCU will maintain a 54-43-7 lead in the series that had continued since the breakup of the Southwest Conference, except for 2006 and the pandemic-impacted 2020 season.

Dykes’ only loss in the series with TCU was 66-42 last year in the highest-scoring game in the series.

“I’m sure it was a really big deal for them to win this game after what we did to them last year. I mean, they were motivated, we put 66 on them. But we didn’t beat them today,” said SMU coach Rhett Lashlee, who was on Dykes' staff in 2018 and 2019, then returned from Miami to replace him as head coach.

"They won, they earned it. They didn’t want to play us no matter what, whether they would have won or lost,” Lashlee said. “We aren’t the ones who stopped playing the game. ... We’re not going to worry about what happens 40 miles west of us.”

TCU won 17 of 19 games in the series before Dykes' two wins at SMU, which were part of the teams splitting the final six games. Over that final span it was discovered that the old rusted skillet was broken and replaced by a new cast iron pan the winner has kept since 2018, ESPN.com reported this week.

In TCU's loss last year, Dykes drew his only career ejection after getting two unsportsmanlike conduct penalties at the start of the second half in Dallas. That was SMU's final game before its first ACC game.

“We try to approach it as another football game. That’s been our approach, that was our approach at SMU. ... Build a good football program, show up for the game, play hard, don’t get caught up in the hype," Dykes said. “I’m the reason we lost the game last year because I got caught up in the hype and, you know, our teams have never done that. None of us did it this year."

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