[Mark McLeod]

I started to overlook the "off-season" part.

You can repeat generating schedules until you get one that's conducive to skipping some of the matches and cutting things short.
For example, adding an extra set of matches at the end that you ignore and just don't play except for one or two of them.
Then find one of the extra matches that includes the non-surrogate teams in the surrogate match and any other teams you want to maximize play for, then substitute and play that or those matches instead.
Just be aware of if this new schedule makes teams play back-to-back matches. If so then an extra field timeout would be called for.
Skip over the scheduled surrogate match altogether.

Save the original schedule in Excel and edit to fit what you are doing, then hand that out to the teams.
The Scorekeeper just needs to select or skip over the originally scheduled matches keeping track of the original vs modified match numbers.

A drawback here is that the calculated team rankings will include one more match for the extra teams playing in that replacement match.