Everything you need to know about the NA LCS Academy League

With a mix of veteran experience and young talent, the Academy League could prove almost as entertaining as the LCS.

By Austen Goslin@AustenG Jan 3, 2018, 3:51pm EST

It’s 2018 and franchising has come to the North American LCS, bringing with it an end to the Challenger Series. In its place Riot is introducing the brand new NA LCS Academy League, a developmental league that will run parallel to the larger NA LCS with 10 teams run by the partnered LCS organizations.

With Riot bringing on a new league to start the new year, here’s everything you need to know about the 2018 NA LCS Academy League.

The format

The NA LCS Academy League is going to look a lot like the NA LCS proper. It will follow 10 teams across a best of one, round robin group stage that will set the table for the playoffs between the top four teams. The playoffs will take place live at the NA LCS studio over the course of two weeks as the semifinals, finals and third place match are played.

The group stage will last nine weeks, just like the NA LCS, and games will be played on Thursday and Friday each week. Thursday games will be played off-stream while each of the Friday matches will be streamed. Riot has yet to release a schedule for the Academy League, which will debut on Friday Jan. 19, but this post will be updated once they do.

The players

With most of the Academy teams announced already, we can see that teams are all taking a pretty varied approach to their rosters for the developmental league. In the case of some teams, like the newly introduced Clutch Gaming, the academy rosters mix newcomers with players that have seen success in the LCS like former FlyQuest jungler Galen “Moon” Holgate and Chae “Piglet” Gwangjin.

For other teams, their rosters are all new players or contain just one veteran voice to help the newer players adjust to their life as competitive players. While each of these rosters differs slightly in the way they are constructed, the one similarity is that the core of the teams are anchored with young talent that teams are prepared to develop into the next generation of NA LCS superstars.