Fan Tuscaloosa News Football Player of the Year: How Voting Works & How to Win

What the Tuscaloosa News football fan vote is and who runs it

The Fan Tuscaloosa News Football Player of the Year lets readers decide which high school football player in the Tuscaloosa, Alabama coverage area takes the newspaper's year-end honor. The organizer is The Tuscaloosa News, the daily paper publishing at tuscaloosanews.com, and the winner is chosen by readers rather than by a selection panel. Nominations are drawn from submissions for Area Football consideration, which is how the newspaper assembles the nominee list before the ballot opens.

Crowdsignal hosts the voting, reached through poll.fm. The ballot for this program lives at https://poll.fm/14816858, and that address serves as the voting link for the whole program. The format is a plain reader ballot: the page lists the nominees with their schools, a reader selects one and submits, and the tally beside each name updates as votes land. On the closed 2024 ballot the leader finished at 46 percent with 25,808 votes and the runner-up at 38 percent with 21,421 votes, which shows how heavily community mobilization can weigh on the result.

Facts at a glance

The dated record for this Tuscaloosa football ballot

The ballot ran in 2023 and again in 2024, and both editions are confirmed. Each window fell in December, which makes the fan vote a winter fixture on the newspaper's high school sports calendar. The most recent ballot carried its results header through the close, and the published end point was noon on Monday, January 19, after which the poll.fm page marked the Tuscaloosa News football poll as closed.

The nomination side of the program is described by the publisher as based on submissions for Area Football consideration, so the roster of nominees comes from the newsroom's own consideration list rather than from an open entry form. What the newspaper has not printed alongside the ballot is a category list for this vote, and no announcement names the year the next edition will run; confirm on the live ballot each cycle.

The final tally on the closed ballot is the clearest dated figure attached to the program: the leading nominee finished at 46 percent on 25,808 votes, with the runner-up at 38 percent on 21,421 votes. Those totals came from a single December window of reader voting, not from any panel decision, and they give a sense of the scale a Tuscaloosa area school community needs to reach in this fan vote.

How a supporter votes in the Tuscaloosa News football poll today

Voting starts at the poll.fm address 14816858, the Crowdsignal page The Tuscaloosa News uses for this award. The mechanic is deliberately simple: a reader reads down the list of high school football nominees, each shown with the school he represents, selects the radio button beside one name, and presses the vote control to submit. No payment step and no nomination form sit in front of the voter during the window; the ballot is the single place where support is cast.

The rule The Tuscaloosa News states for readers is one vote per person each day. In practice that means the poll rewards persistence across the December window rather than a single burst: a family that votes on ten separate days delivers ten times the support of one visit. Because the page displays the running percentage and raw total beside every nominee, supporters can watch whether their player is gaining or falling and adjust how hard they push the school community.

Once the window closes, the poll.fm page flips to a closed state and shows the final standings, exactly as it did when the Tuscaloosa News football ballot shut at noon on Monday, January 19. Votes submitted after that point do not count, so anyone planning a last-day push should finish well before the stated closing time rather than assume the page accepts late entries.

Where this ballot sits among the Alabama high school fan votes

The Tuscaloosa News football player of the year vote is not an isolated poll. It belongs to a family of Alabama high school sports ballots that use the same public vote format, and each is run under its own publisher and its own window. The nearest siblings are the Alabama High School Football Player of the Year and the Alabama High School Football Player of the Week, both covering football across the state rather than the Tuscaloosa market specifically.

Beyond football, the same format carries the Alabama High School Baseball Player of the Week, the Alabama High School Boys Basketball Player of the Week, the Alabama High School Boys Basketball Player of the Year and the Alabama High School Girls Basketball Player of the Week. The weekly programs refresh their ballots through the season, while the player of the year votes, including this Tuscaloosa News football edition, concentrate on a single December window.

What distinguishes the Tuscaloosa ballot is its publisher and its market: it is the newspaper's own fan vote for its local coverage area, with nominees drawn from schools such as Hillcrest, Central, Berry and Tuscaloosa Academy, rather than a statewide list. A supporter deciding where effort pays off should treat each of these ballots separately, because a vote cast on one poll.fm page never carries to another.

Strengthening support in the Tuscaloosa News football fan vote

Because this Tuscaloosa News ballot caps support at one vote per person each day, the strongest legitimate push is organized daily participation. Families, teammates and student sections at schools like Hillcrest or Central can set a reminder to return to the poll.fm ballot every day of the December window, and a reminder chain through the school's own channels turns that rule into a real margin. The newspaper's stated format is a reader vote, so mobilizing readers is exactly the behavior the ballot is designed to measure.

The organizer has published no statement about outside assistance or vote services, so supporters weighing a paid push have no publisher guidance to rely on for this specific ballot. The safest reading is the ballot's own printed rule: daily participation, real supporters, within the window. For tactics that work within public vote mechanics, the get more votes online guide covers community-driven approaches, and the award vote service page describes the commercial side for readers who want the full picture.