Colorado Boys Basketball Player of the Week: How Voting Works & How to Win

Two different things live on the same page: the rankings and the vote

Confuse these two and a campaign wastes its week. SI publishes a statewide Colorado boys basketball rankings feature, a computed, editorial list built from results and strength of schedule, on the same si.com/high-school/colorado hub that hosts the separate Player of the Week fan poll. One is math. The other is whoever clicks the most between Monday and the article's close.

A program ranked outside the top ten in the SI power rankings can still win the weekly fan vote in the same week, because the fan poll doesn't weight by ranking, class, or record. It weights by turnout. That gap between "who SI's analysts rank highest" and "who the fan poll crowns" is not a bug in the system; it's the entire reason a fan-vote page is worth a separate strategy from a rankings page. For the general mechanics of how a fan-vote poll like this one gets decided, the online contest voting guide covers that before the Colorado-specific pieces below.

Where this ballot sits next to Colorado's other si.com prep polls

High School on SI runs more than one Colorado program, and they don't all work the same way. The football Player of the Week ballot and its offense-only companion both run August through November, tied to Friday-night results. This basketball edition runs the opposite half of the calendar: winter, roughly January through March, and it pulls from a different classification structure than football's six tiers.

None of these four cannibalize each other's voter pool directly, since they almost never overlap on the calendar. But a family that already has si.com bookmarked from football season in November is a warmer audience for the basketball ballot in January than a household discovering the site cold. That carryover is worth more than most campaigns give it credit for.

What si.com actually confirms about the weekly basketball ballot

Details are thinner here than on football. SI's Colorado hub has published boys basketball Player of the Year ballots in past seasons, which confirms the site treats basketball as a full editorial vertical, not an afterthought. A standalone results archive for the weekly basketball poll isn't published the way the Monday football recap is searchable.

The vote-cap row is the one worth double-checking before assuming anything. SI has run both capped and uncapped versions of the same basic poll format across different states and seasons. The six-hour reset used on some SBLive editions is not universal. Whatever this week's article states supersedes anything written here or on any prior week's post.

Denver metro density against a Western Slope program's tighter circle

Basketball compresses Colorado's geography differently than football does. Denver East, Regis Jesuit, Cherry Creek, and Mullen all sit inside a short drive of downtown Denver, each pulling from big, well-connected alumni and booster networks. A nominee from that cluster starts a January week with more eyeballs already on the sport than almost anywhere else in the state.

Distance changes the math on the Western Slope. Durango and Palisade run basketball programs where a home game is close to a town event, not one option among a dozen. Fewer total households in the potential voter pool, sure — but a booster text reaching most of a 4A town by dinnertime moves faster, relative to its size, than a metro-area push working through a sprawling district's parent email chain. Neither model wins by default; it depends how many days the ballot stays live and how quickly each network actually opens the link.

Getting on the ballot, then working the week before it closes

Nomination for this poll runs through editorial review of box scores, the same pattern SI uses on its other Colorado sport verticals. A coach or parent who sends a school, opponent, and stat line directly to the desk shortens the odds a strong week gets flagged instead of buried under a busy CHSAA basketball schedule with dozens of games statewide on a given weekend.

Once live, the arithmetic is simple: more real people returning to vote across the full window outperforms one household grinding a single device. A team group chat, a booster email list, an alumni network, a church or civic bulletin for programs that have one; stacking two or three channels beats leaning on the single biggest one. Weeks with a light schedule, or ones landing right after a rivalry game, tend to see less organic traffic on their own, which is exactly when a coordinated push earns its keep. When the natural network has been worked and the gap to close is still wider than organic reach allows, structured vote-support services built for sports fan polls exist for a window like this one: paced, human-pattern delivery matched to the ballot's actual traffic, not a rapid-fire burst that reads as automated. Always check the live si.com article's current terms first, since SI's rules can shift between seasons; the is buying votes legal page covers that ground in more detail. For the fuller list of what else is running across the state, the Colorado contests directory, which also carries Denver's Top of the Town and Best of Denver readers-choice programs, lays out the full picture.