Scheduling & the Season Calendar
The Season at a Glance
A dynasty year runs through a fixed sequence: preseason (schedules are built, rosters trimmed to the funded limit), the regular season (roughly 34 games from October into early March, mostly played in Friday/Saturday weekend series), conference tournaments in mid-March, the NCAA tournament in late March/early April, and the offseason from April through August — see The Offseason for that whole sequence.
A Friday/Saturday weekend series is taxing on a single goaltender — programs lean on a two-goalie tandem to survive the grind, and it shows on tired legs by Saturday night if you don't.
A December academic eligibility audit checks every rostered player's standing partway through the season — see Injuries & Discipline for what's at stake.
How Your Schedule Gets Built
Your schedule is rebuilt fresh every preseason. Conference games are set for you — a weekend series against every conference opponent, interleaved across the season rather than clustered together, so league play and non-conference games alternate throughout the year.
Non-conference games reflect a real philosophy, and every program in the league follows one: some chase a marquee, resume-building slate against strong opponents; some maximize wins with a softer schedule; some stay close to home; some balance it. The schedule-builder fills your open weeks with opponents that fit your approach, while guaranteeing every team lands around the NCAA total of 34 games between conference and non-conference play combined.
Showcase tournaments — a December event and a February event, each tied to a specific historical set of schools — are locked in ahead of everything else for their participants, exactly like the real sport's holiday tournaments.
Buy Games — Money Changes Hands
When a genuinely mismatched pair schedules a series, money moves as part of the deal, just like real college hockey:
- A strong program scheduling down pays the weaker opponent for the trouble.
- A weaker program reaching up for a marquee home date pays the stronger opponent to make the trip.
- Two comparable programs playing each other exchange nothing.
This money flows through your Revenue Share, and league-wide it always nets to zero — it moves around, it isn't created. See Finances.
Building Your Own Schedule
Before the season locks in, you can reshape your own non-conference slate — trade out an opponent you'd rather not play for one you would. Every trade is fair to the rest of the league by design: whoever you bump, and whoever your new opponent was previously playing, both get reshuffled into a fitting replacement series rather than left stranded, and any buy-game money involved resettles automatically to match the new matchups.
See Also
- The Offseason — what happens once your season and its schedule wrap up
- Rankings & the Postseason — how the games you schedule feed into your NPI
- Finances — where buy-game money lands