Arkansas High School Football Player of the Week: How Voting Works & How to Win

What you don't know coming in — and what the Oct. 22 ballot reveals

Most people arrive at an SI fan-vote page expecting a five- or six-name field. The Arkansas football ballot ran 10 nominees the week of Oct. 22, 2025. Ten names on one ballot changes the math in a specific way: no single school can win by a runaway majority unless it consolidates fast, and a community that even modestly out-organizes nine others can take the lead in an otherwise split field.

The confirmed Oct. 22 field gives you the clearest picture of who actually lands here. Wally Wolcott (Lakeside, 417 pass yds, 4 TDs), Kooper Caldwell (Murfreesboro, 396 pass yds, 5 TDs, 1 rush TD), Easton Barksdale (Sheridan, 381 pass yds, 4 TDs), Sedrick Allen (Hot Springs, 314 pass yds plus 96 rush yds and 2 more TDs), Cannon Jacobs (El Dorado, 258 pass and 133 rush, 3 TDs). Five more: Kane Archer and Cooper Bland (both from Greenwood, both on the same ballot), Kevin Williams (Robinson, 228 rush yds, 4 TDs on 19 carries), Jacob Miles (Searcy, 81% completion, 350 yds, 6 TDs), and Aron Orgil (Pulaski Academy, 371 pass yds, 5 TDs). That is the actual cross-section — Class 6A powers alongside programs from Hot Springs, El Dorado, Murfreesboro, and Robinson.

One thing this week illustrates clearly: Greenwood landing two players on the same ballot splits their school's vote. A Greenwood family voting for Kane Archer is not a vote for Cooper Bland. If your school is in that position, the campaign has to pick one name and stay on it — the data from Oct. 22 doesn't tell us which one won, but it does tell you the choice is the first decision to make.

The other thing not visible from a single ballot: SI does not publish raw vote totals for the football poll. You know the winner's name; you don't know the margin. For calibration, a confirmed Arkansas girls basketball poll in January 2025 drew 31,500+ total votes, with the winner taking 51%. That is a rough floor for scale — football may run differently, but the SI Arkansas audience is not small.

The Sunday close, and what that does to your week

The ballot closes Sunday at 11:59 p.m. PT. Not Monday. That single constraint shapes everything about when campaign energy needs to be spent.

Games happen Friday night. SI's editor compiles stat lines Saturday into Sunday and publishes the ballot Sunday. That gives a campaign roughly one day — Sunday — to do most of its work before the window closes at midnight Pacific time. Saturday night, after results are in, is when nomination emails to [email protected] matter most. Sunday morning is when the ballot link should be going out. Sunday afternoon is the real push.

The practical difference from polls with a Monday or Tuesday close: there is no second-day recovery. If Sunday goes quiet — if the booster page only posts once, if the player's own account doesn't share the link — there is no Monday morning push to make up for it. The compressed cadence is the defining feature of this poll's mechanics, more than the platform, the nominee count, or anything else.

For structured vote support, that window means orders placed Saturday or early Sunday have the full active period to deliver before Sunday's close.

Arkansas's classification landscape and what it means on a shared ballot

Arkansas AAA football runs seven classifications: 7A (the largest), 6A, 5A, 4A, 3A, 2A, and 1A. Bryant won the 2025 Class 7A state title 13-0 and had a nominee on the Oct. 30, 2024 ballot (Jordan Walker, 14/18, 308 pass yds, 6 TDs). But the Oct. 22, 2025 field had no Bryant nominee — and featured Murfreesboro, Sheridan, El Dorado, Robinson, and Searcy alongside Greenwood (6A) and Pulaski Academy.

That spread is the whole point. The ballot draws from a state that runs from programs like Bentonville or Fort Smith Northside in the northwest to smaller rural programs in the Delta. A 1A or 2A school that puts up a historic week can appear on the same ballot as a 6A contender, and on this platform enrollment does not determine the outcome. A town of a few thousand with one active group chat on a Sunday afternoon can out-poll a city school whose larger fan base turns out at five percent.

Pulaski Academy is the clearest illustration of how classification cuts differently here. Their pass-heavy offense regularly produces 370-400 yard passing lines — the kind of stat that gets nominated — but winning the ballot requires the Bruins community to mobilize a Sunday, not just post a big number. For more on how Arkansas prep football runs across its regions, see /usa/arkansas/.

Getting your player nominated, and what happens after

Two problems are actually one: if your player doesn't make the ballot, nothing else matters. SI's editor builds the field from what's submitted, and the nomination channel is confirmed — [email protected], or @reed_green7 on X. Send the full stat line (completions-attempts if a QB, carries and yards if a runner), the touchdown count, the opponent and score, and the school's classification. Saturday night is when that email should land.

Once the ballot is live on Sunday, the campaign is reach. The poll has no per-period cap; a supporter can vote more than once through Sunday night. But the number that moves is people reached, not device cycles — one person voting twenty times adds twenty; one group chat with two hundred people sharing the link has more upside. The job on Sunday is to widen the circle before midnight Pacific, not deepen it on one phone.

Because the entire contest is settled by public fan turnout — no committee, no editorial override after the poll closes — the poll is what it says it is: whoever brings more supporters to si.com by Sunday night wins. The how-to guide walks through the weekly fan-vote cadence in general; the national directory of fan-vote contests is at /usa/.