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

Six classes, one ballot: why Colorado football works differently than most states

Most states running a High School on SI football poll split the vote by classification, region, or media market. Colorado doesn't. CHSAA runs six enrollment classes for football, 1A through 6A, and the weekly poll pulls nominees from that entire field onto a single statewide ballot. A Class 6A program with a four-figure enrollment and a Class 1A eight-man squad from the Eastern Plains can share the same list in the same week.

That is not a footnote. It is the reason a small program's fan base occasionally punches through against a Front Range powerhouse — turnout, not roster size, decides a fan poll. CHSAA reclassifies enrollment bands roughly every two years, so which schools land in which class shifts; the six-tier structure itself has held steady. For how classification breadth plays out in Colorado's other weekly sports polls, the Colorado High School Athlete of the Week page covers the year-round version of the same mechanic.

Football compresses that dynamic into twelve or thirteen weeks instead of a full calendar. August through November is the entire window. There's no spring track meet to fall back on if a campaign misses its Sunday close; every week the ballot is live is one of a fairly short number of shots a program gets that season.

How si.com/high-school/colorado/football actually runs each week

The SBLive Colorado desk builds the ballot from Friday-night results, publishing the poll article early the following week. It stays open through the weekend. Exact close times have shifted between seasons on SI's platform generally, so the live article, not a cached memory of last year's deadline, is the only reliable source for this week's cutoff.

No per-device cap or six-hour cooldown is documented on this poll's own page the way it is for some sibling SI state editions. Confirm the current rules on the live article before assuming either a capped or an unlimited structure. SI has run both models across different states and years, and a page like this one can't outrun a mid-season platform change.

Twelve to thirteen weeks is short. A program that misses the nomination window in week three doesn't get a second try until week four rolls around, and by week ten the regular season is closing in on the CHSAA playoff bracket, which pulls fan attention toward postseason brackets instead of the weekly poll.

Front Range density versus a Western Slope program's tighter reach

Denver's southern suburbs are the densest six-man (sorry, six-class) football corridor in the state. Cherry Creek, Grandview, Regis Jesuit, and Valor Christian sit within a short drive of each other, all Class 6A, all drawing from large, populous school districts. A nominee from that cluster starts with a bigger raw pool of possible voters than almost anywhere else in Colorado.

But raw pool size and conversion rate are two different numbers. A suburban 6A district's parent network sprawls across dozens of subdivisions and several feeder middle schools: wide, not necessarily fast. A program like Delta, on the Western Slope in a Class 3A bracket, or Sterling out on the Northeast Plains in Class 2A, draws from a town where the football team is genuinely a shared civic interest. Fewer total households, sure. But a text from the booster club chair reaches most of them by dinnertime.

Faith-network schools cut across this pattern differently again. Valor Christian and Mullen both carry multi-generational alumni bases that don't map neatly to geography — a parish or diocesan network in Denver can reach former students now living in Colorado Springs or even out of state. That's a different kind of density than either the suburban sprawl model or the small-town model. None of these networks is inherently stronger; they convert differently depending on how many days the ballot stays open and how the close date lands against a bye week. General mobilization mechanics for polls built this way are covered in the online contest voting guide.

Getting a program noticed before the ballot locks

The nominee list comes from the editorial desk reviewing Friday-night box scores, which means a standout performance that nobody flags to SBLive can get missed even when the stat line earns it. Coaches, parents, and booster contacts who send a school, opponent, and stat summary directly increase the odds a deserving program's nominee actually lands on the ballot instead of getting lost in a busy football weekend across dozens of Colorado games.

Once the ballot is live, the campaign math is straightforward but unforgiving: more real voters returning across the full window beats one device grinding away in isolation. A booster email list, a team group chat, an alumni Facebook page, a diocesan bulletin if the school has one; stacking two or three of those channels usually outperforms leaning on just the biggest one.

Weeks near a bye or ahead of a playoff seeding announcement tend to draw less organic attention, which is exactly when a coordinated push matters most. And when a program has already worked its natural network and the gap is still wider than organic reach can close before Sunday, structured vote-support services for sports fan polls exist for exactly this kind of weekly window. The approach that holds up is paced, human-pattern delivery matched to the poll's actual traffic, not a rapid-fire burst that reads as automated and gets pulled. Whatever the mix, always read the current terms at si.com before running any outside push, since SI's rules can move between seasons. For the legal and platform-terms side of buying votes generally, see is buying votes legal.

Where the football poll sits inside Colorado's fall sports calendar

Twelve to thirteen weeks sounds like plenty until a program lands its one strong candidate in week two and then has to watch that momentum fade while the ballot moves on to new nominees every week after. The regular season runs into the CHSAA playoff bracket near the tail end of the window, and postseason coverage tends to pull fan attention toward bracket updates instead of a weekly fan poll. Whether the article keeps publishing through the playoff rounds or wraps with the regular season has varied year to year across SI's football editions, so a program still in contention late in the season should check the live si.com page rather than assume last year's pattern repeats.

This poll doesn't exist in isolation. The same organizer runs the Colorado High School Athlete of the Week across all three CHSAA seasons, and regional editions like the Fort Collins Blue FCU Athlete of the Week add a second, city-level layer on top of the statewide ballot for programs in that market. A Fort Collins-area football nominee can, in principle, show up on both the statewide football ballot and a local weekly recognition program in the same season; the two aren't mutually exclusive, and they draw on overlapping but distinct voter pools.

For the fuller picture of what else is running across Colorado, the Colorado contests directory lists the state's active fan-vote programs by category. And for the mechanics of running a multi-week mobilization campaign, not just a single push, the contest voting how-to hub covers pacing a campaign across a full season instead of one Sunday deadline.