Boston College 2011-2012 hockey schedule released

Sometimes, quiet Saturdays don’t turn out to be quiet.

With four weeks to go until Boston College football kicks off, the men’s ice hockey team reminded us it exists today when Hockey East posted the Eagles’ schedule on their website. Kudos to BCI’s Brian for bringing this to our attention.

Some of the highlights include the following:

• Opening the season in Grand Forks, North Dakota against Michigan State, with the possibility of playing them again in late December at the Great Lakes Invitational

• Three regular-season games against Boston University; not including a potential Beanpot final, the season series with them will be complete by December 3

• Season series with Hockey East runners-up Merrimack is entirely in the second half of the season; first meeting will be on January 8

• Big gap between meetings with New Hampshire: first game on October 15, with the second and third on January 27 and 28, respectively

• Beanpot semifinal against Northeastern on February 6; final on February 13

• Non-conference games against the aforementioned Spartans, Denver, Notre Dame*, Yale, Michigan, and possibly Michigan Tech in the Great Lakes Invitational; of those, only the Denver game is at home

• Only eight home games in the 2011 part of the schedule, and three straight home games to end the regular season

(*Another hat-tip to Brian: the Hockey East schedule has two ND games, but ND’s website lists one.)

The non-conference schedule being mostly outside of Conte Forum is interesting; the second game of the season features Denver coming in, but beyond that, the rest of the games are either on neutral ice or someone else’s ice. That should make for a little bit of a tough stretch as the season gets started. Otherwise, since it’s conference-games heavy as you would expect, there’s nothing of note here. We know who BC plays year-in and year-out, so nothing is a surprise.

Now back to preparing for football.