Campus Ice: North Dakota and Michigan State take a must-win to Texas

Halloween weekend is when college hockey stops being a poll and starts being a season. The Big Ten opens, the NCHC opens, the Ivies finally show up, and the best game of the lot is in a 6,800-seat AHL barn outside Austin, Texas. I'll take that trade every year.

The loser of Saturday's U.S. Hockey Hall of Fame Game has lost three of its last four, and that's the stake nobody in Michigan State green or North Dakota green wants to say out loud.

Weekend slate

1. Michigan State vs. North Dakota, Saturday, 8:07 p.m. ET, H-E-B Center at Cedar Park.

The Hall of Fame Game goes back at least to 1978 in Eveleth, and North Dakota has treated it like a home game ever since: this is the Hawks' 12th appearance, they're 8-3-0 in the first 11, and it's their first game ever in Texas, in the Texas Stars' building.

Both teams limp in, because No. 4 Michigan State got outshot 73-37 over two nights in Durham, lost 1-0 on Friday and needed Mason West's first college goal to split. No. 8 North Dakota got swept by unranked Minnesota, and Jan Spunar gave up 10 goals on 47 shots.

My read: the Spartans' shot problem is the real one. You can survive a bad goalie weekend, but you can't get outshot two to one by UNH and expect it to fix itself against a team this angry, so I'll take the Hawks by two.

2. Minnesota Duluth at Colorado College, Friday and Saturday, 9 p.m. ET.

The NCHC opener nobody will talk about and everybody should. No. 7 UMD's Carl Axelsson stopped 47 of 48 in a sweep of Bemidji State, and No. 9 CC's Jackson Unger stopped 56 of 58 against Air Force. Max Plante is out with an upper-body injury, which thins a line I wrote about in October.

The weekend's lowest-scoring series, and its best one.

3. The Big Ten opens. No. 1 Michigan is 7-0-0 after beating Western Michigan on Will Horcoff's goal with 0.1 seconds left, and it goes to Columbus on Saturday. No. 2 Wisconsin's 4-0 shutout of Western Michigan goes in the books as an exhibition, so the Badgers' 4-0-0 is officially on the line Friday against Notre Dame.

4. The Ivies arrive. No. 12 Dartmouth and No. 15 Cornell have sat in the poll at 0-0-0 since the preseason ballot. Cornell opens at Lynah against Sacred Heart, Dartmouth hosts Alaska on Saturday and Harvard goes to UMass. Cornell is a top-20 team by Thanksgiving.

The Hockey East weekend

Providence at Quinnipiac, Saturday at noon, is the Hockey East game of the weekend even though it's nonconference. The Friars are 5-0-0 for the first time since 2002-03 after sweeping UMass Lowell, with Jack Parsons' 30-save shutout on Friday. They're No. 5 in the poll and 12th in the NPI, and that gap is the point.

Quinnipiac is No. 10 in the poll and fifth in the NPI even after losing 4-3 to Army in overtime on a goal with 17 seconds left. Saturday in Hamden is the Friars' first chance to turn a perfect record into a tournament résumé, and a loss costs them more than it costs the Bobcats.

Maine at Boston University is the league series, Friday at 7 and Saturday at 6 at Agganis. Both teams are 4-2-0, Maine is new to the poll at No. 19 and BU is No. 14.

The Terriers just put six on UConn, with three assists from Xavier Villeneuve and Mikhail Yegorov standing up through a five-minute kill. Jay Pandolfo called the first period "our worst game from a defensive standpoint," and BU still won by three.

Ben Barr said his team has to "hold on to the puck when we have the puck," and that's the series in one sentence: Maine wants to shrink it, BU wants to open it.

By our count, the BU pipeline is fine without either of them. Macklin Celebrini has 15 points in 11 games in San Jose, and Cole Hutson is averaging 19.1 minutes a night on the Washington blue line, per NHL data.

Northeastern at Boston College is the other one: BC is 1-3-1 after one point in Denver, and Northeastern's 11th-place NPI vanishes if it drops two at Conte. UConn at Merrimack and UNH at Vermont round it out.

NPI watch

Michigan and Wisconsin are 1-2 in the poll and in the NPI, and after that the lists stop agreeing: Union is third in the NPI at 3-2-0, while Denver is third in the poll and 23rd in the NPI.

North Dakota is 18th heading into Saturday, and a loss to Michigan State, fourth at 59.58, still hurts in March.

Rivalry file

Saturday is the 105th meeting between North Dakota and Michigan State, and the Hawks lead it 64-37-3. They've met only four times in the last decade, a North Dakota sweep at Munn in 2015 and a Michigan State win and a tie at the Ralph the next season.

The last time they met in this game, in 2007-08, North Dakota won 6-0 in Grand Forks.

Michigan State's 2025 Hobey Baker winner, Isaac Howard, is in Edmonton now, averaging 9.6 minutes a night with three points in 12 games, per NHL data. Replacing that in East Lansing is the Spartans' real question this year.

Kessler's call

Maine takes three of four points at Agganis, and Quinnipiac beats Providence at noon. I'll grade both next Thursday.