Colorado Football Offensive Player of the Week: How Voting Works & How to Win

Colorado's football poll splits by side of the ball, and what that actually changes

Sports Illustrated's High School on SI network didn't build a brand-new statewide football poll when it split the ballot in Colorado. It split an existing one. The organizer already runs a combined weekly vote covering every CHSAA football program at si.com/high-school/colorado/football, offense and defense nominees sharing the same list. The offense-only ballot pulls quarterbacks, running backs, receivers, and offensive linemen off that shared slate and gives them a poll of their own.

The template isn't a Colorado invention, either. Maryland split its combined Player of the Week ballot into separate offense and defense polls starting in 2025, each running at its own dedicated si.com address. Georgia confirmed the same move the same year, with a live offense-only ballot running the week of August 18, 2025. Colorado's split follows that confirmed pattern. What isn't confirmed here is the exact week Colorado's own offense ballot first went live, or whether a matching defense-only Colorado edition exists yet; that's worth checking directly on si.com/high-school/colorado/football rather than assuming both halves of the split arrived on the same schedule.

Why split at all? A combined ballot buries a lineman's blocking week under a linebacker's three-tackle-for-loss night, two different statistical languages competing for the same handful of slots. An offense-only field means every nominee gets judged against the same category of production, yards, touchdowns, completion rate, not against a defensive stat sheet that doesn't map onto it. General mobilization mechanics that apply across fan-vote formats like this are covered in the online contest voting guide before narrowing to what's specific to Colorado's offense ballot.

How this offense ballot compares to Colorado's other statewide fan-vote pages

Colorado runs more than one weekly recognition program, and mixing them up costs a supporter a deadline. Lining up the offense ballot against its closest siblings is more useful than describing this one in isolation.

Only the first three rows are true weekly sports fan-vote formats; the Summit County and Steamboat ballots are annual readers'-choice programs for restaurants, shops, and services, run once a year rather than every week of a season. Treat this offense ballot with an annual-campaign mindset and a program misses most of its actual voting windows.

Mechanics: what's published for Colorado's offense ballot, and what's a live-page check

si.com/high-school/colorado/football is the hub for the combined ballot, and it's the most reliable starting point for the offense-only version too. High School on SI doesn't appear to run separate standalone URLs for every Colorado sub-poll the way Maryland's distinct offense and defense addresses do.

That gap in cap-and-close detail isn't unique to the offense ballot; the combined Colorado poll carries the same blank. Maryland's defensive ballot does publish a Sunday 11:59 p.m. Pacific close on its own page. Whether Colorado's offense ballot inherits that exact cadence or runs its own schedule is the kind of detail that shifts between SI's state editions, and it needs a live-page check rather than an assumption carried over from another state.

Six CHSAA classes, one narrower field: why an offense-only ballot changes the math

An offense-only ballot changes the arithmetic before a single vote gets cast. A full-roster Colorado ballot can pull from any position, a Cherry Creek pass rusher, a Regis Jesuit cornerback, a Grandview quarterback, whoever had the loudest Friday night. Strip out defense and special teams, and the weekly pool shrinks to whichever skill-position and line performances actually stood out that week. On a bye week, or a run-heavy slate with no big passing numbers, that pool can get thin fast.

Front Range density still matters the way it does across Colorado prep sports generally. Cherry Creek, Grandview, Regis Jesuit, and Valor Christian sit inside a corridor a driver can cross in under an hour, all fielding CHSAA's largest classifications, and most weeks producing enough offensive statistical volume to keep a quarterback or receiver in the conversation. A Western Slope program, Delta, out past Grand Junction and running a smaller 3A offense, needs a genuinely standout offensive week just to earn an offense-only nomination, because there's no defensive stat line left to fall back on if the quarterback has an average night.

That narrower field cuts both ways for a campaign. Fewer nominees per week means a Sterling or a Delta offense that does break through faces less overall competition for attention than it would on a full combined ballot. But it also means one quiet offensive week and a program's realistic shot at that week's list disappears; there's no linebacker's forced fumble available to substitute in its place. For the fuller picture of what else is running across the state, the Colorado contests directory maps CHSAA's broader fan-vote landscape alongside this one.

Building a campaign around a role-specific Colorado ballot

Confirming a nominee actually landed on the offense-only post is the first job, and it isn't automatic. A two-way Colorado standout whose week was defined by an interception return rather than a rushing touchdown may not make an offense ballot even carrying the same box score that would have earned a combined-ballot nomination. Checking si.com/high-school/colorado/football directly for that week's offense post, rather than assuming a strong Friday translates automatically, saves a program from building a push around an athlete who isn't actually on the list.

Once a nominee is confirmed live, reach outperforms repetition on a poll built this way. A parent group text, the booster program's email list, and the school's official athletics account each reach a different slice of the same community, and running all three together tends to beat leaning hard on just one. Sharing the direct post link, not the player's name alone, keeps every channel pointed at the correct week's ballot, which matters more than it sounds on a network that publishes a fresh article every week.

Colorado's six-class breadth still applies inside the narrower offense field: a small-school offense with a centralized parent network can move fast even against Front Range volume. Nothing about narrowing the ballot to offense removes that dynamic. For general week-to-week mobilization pacing, the contest voting how-to hub covers reminder timing across a multi-week push. When a program has already worked its natural network and the gap is still open heading into whatever close time that week's post states, paid vote-support services built for sports fan polls exist for exactly this format, paced, human-pattern delivery, not a rapid-fire script that reads as automated. Reading the terms on the live si.com post before running any outside push is worth the two minutes, since the legal and platform-terms picture can shift between seasons.