The Mountain West’s new scheduling format for football isn’t the end of the world. That’s still a few years down the road from now, when the top 40 percent or so of the programs break away from the rest of the NCAA and college athletics.

Until then, by comparison everything else should just be considered a minor annoyance. Well, unless you don’t have an FBS Division I-sized stadium, and won’t for several years … that’s something to also be concerned about.

For the University of Hawaii and the rest of the Mountain West, the elimination of divisions just means teams won’t play some opponents every season that they’re used to playing; it’s not like they’re going away forever, at least not yet.

In UH’s case this means the Warriors will not meet up with Nevada, Fresno State and San Jose State once each from 2023 to 2025. These are some of Hawaii’s fellow former West Division teams (UH will play the other two, San Diego State and UNLV, all three years).

Which is or are deserving of the label “rival”?

It depends on how you look at it, how you define the concept.

If all it takes is a trophy and a Wikipedia entry, Wyoming and Air Force are Hawaii rivals. The Warriors play the Cowboys for the Paniolo Trophy and the Falcons for the Kuter Trophy. I don’t know a lot of Hawaii folks who don’t have some kind of personal Wyoming or Air Force connection that consider either of these games to be rivalries.

San Jose State gets a little more big-game cred, because the trophy for the winner of the Warriors-Spartans game is named for Dick Tomey — who was a great head coach at both schools.

If a very unscientific poll means anything, UH fans consider Fresno State as Hawaii’s biggest current rival, by far. Then it’s Boise State, San Jose State and Nevada, in that order.

“In my lifetime, it’s been Fresno (State) but that rivalry was pretty lean between 2012-2019,” said Mason Yoshida, a Hawaii fan still in his 20s.

“Current” is a strange word to use when talking about rivalries, because they’re supposed to last forever and ever. In some cases now they don’t, because of conference realignment.

Nearly all of the teams named above have played numerous big games against the Warriors with championships on the line. But none of the others besides BYU have generated as much love-to-loathe as the Bulldogs.

As long as Hawaii keeps playing Fresno State significantly more often than Brigham Young — and in significant games — it will remain UH’s chief rival. For some older folks, though, the Cougars are permanently Hawaii’s all-time public enemy No. 1.

“I voted for Fresno but it’ll always be BYU,” Glenn Kurashima tweeted.

The Cougars were the one team the Rainbow Warriors had to beat for more than a decade. This was partly because it took UH so long to finally break its 10-game losing streak in the series. It was a game that sometimes had Western Athletic Conference — and one year for BYU, national — championship implications. Another reason is the Cougars often beat the ’Bows with guys who were Hawaii high school stars.

UH finally broke through, and in a big way, with 56-14 and 59-28 wins over BYU in 1989 and 1990.

The breakup of the WAC ate away at the rivalry, and the Cougars and Warriors have played seven times since their last WAC meeting in 1998. Hawaii won just the first and last of those; interestingly, the victories were Nick Rolovich’s last games as UH quarterback (72-45 in 2001) and head coach (38-34 in the 2019 Hawaii Bowl).

The erosion of rivalries is one of the unintended consequences of conference realignment, as money wins out over tradition — even, or especially, when we’re talking about the power conferences and brand-name programs.

One of the biggest rivalries affected was Texas and Texas A&M, which have never played each other since the 2011 season, after which the Aggies left the Big 12 for the SEC. (With Texas now headed to the SEC, the rivalry will be revived.)

But what about the Cal-UCLA and Stanford-USC rivalries? With UCLA and USC headed to the Big Ten will those schools schedule their California counterparts in nonconference games? Or will it be like Texas, which vowed to never play A&M when it defected?

Rivalries are about tradition.

Without tradition, even big-time college football is just minor league football.