Colorado High School Football Player of the Year: How Voting Works & How to Win

The football Player of the Year ballot hides at a different address than the weekly poll

Type si.com/high-school/colorado/football into a browser expecting to land on the Player of the Year ballot, and most of the year that search comes up empty. That address belongs to the weekly Football Player of the Week poll and its offense- and defense-only companions. The annual football honor runs somewhere else: the general si.com/high-school/colorado hub, the same page that names a Player of the Year in basketball, baseball, and every other CHSAA sport High School on SI covers in the state.

That's not a footnote. A booster club that bookmarked the weekly poll's dedicated football address during an October campaign has bookmarked the wrong page for the year-end vote. The annual ballot runs as a standalone dated article on the shared hub, published once the season wraps rather than sitting at one fixed URL a fan could return to on faith.

Scale sets this ballot apart too. CHSAA fields six enrollment classes for football, 1A through 6A — one more tier than it uses for most other sports on the same annual program. Funnel a six-class statewide season into a single article and the nominee field is, structurally, the largest of any single-sport Colorado POY vote the network runs. For the year-round version of the shared format, the Colorado High School Player of the Year hub covers how the annual mechanics work across every CHSAA sport, not just football.

Is there a list of past Colorado football Player of the Year winners?

No. Nothing on si.com compiles one. Each year's football POY result runs as its own dated article on the shared hub, and those posts have never been gathered into a browsable list a recruiter or a fan could scroll through by season. Saying that plainly beats guessing at a number that might not hold from one year to the next.

What does hold up is the structure behind the ballot, not a roster of prior honorees.

Six classes is the number worth sitting with. A Class 6A program from a Denver suburb and a Class 1A eight-man squad from the eastern plains both feed the same season-long pool this one article eventually draws from. Nothing in the public record narrows that field by class before the ballot opens.

Does this annual ballot run on the same weekly rhythm as the Player of the Week poll?

No, and the difference shapes everything about how a campaign should plan around it. The weekly polls reset constantly: a new article publishes early each week during the CHSAA season, stays open through the weekend, and closes before the next Friday's games even kick off. The Colorado Football Player of the Week ballot and its offense-only and defense-only companions all run on that short cycle — twelve or thirteen separate sprints across one fall.

The Player of the Year vote doesn't work that way. One article. One season's worth of nominees. It opens once the regular season and the six-class postseason wrap, generally by November, and stays live longer than a single weekend before High School on SI names the honoree. Exactly how many days that window runs isn't fixed to a public calendar entry; that detail sits inside whichever year's live article is currently posted.

Nomination logic shifts too. A weekly nominee gets flagged from one strong Friday. An annual nominee has to hold up across a full season and all six classes, so a program's best single game in September doesn't guarantee a spot the way it might on a weekly ballot built around that exact performance. Season-long production, not one highlight, is what the editorial desk weighs once the postseason ends.

A six-class statewide field turns Front Range turnout into only half the equation

Cherry Creek, Valor Christian, Regis Jesuit, and Grandview all sit within a short drive of one another in the Denver metro area, every one of them Class 6A, every one drawing from a large, well-connected school community. A nominee from that cluster starts the annual vote with more eyes already on Colorado prep football than almost any program in the state can claim.

Raw numbers aren't the whole story, though. Delta, on the Western Slope in Class 3A, and Sterling, on the northeast plains in Class 2A, run programs where a standout season is a shared town interest rather than one option competing against a dozen others for attention. Fewer households in the realistic voter pool, sure. But a message from a booster-club officer or the coaching staff's own account can reach most of a small town before the next practice, something a sprawling suburban district's mailing list often needs several days to match.

Six classes feeding one ballot means none of that gets sorted out in advance. A 6A program's enrollment doesn't buy it a separate bracket, and a 1A program's smaller size doesn't earn it a lighter field to beat. The vote total alone decides it, whatever the class breakdown looks like once the article goes up. Colorado runs this same statewide-versus-local tension across its other fan-vote programs, including the readers'-choice pair Top of the Town and Best of Denver — both built around local business categories rather than sport, but running on a comparable metro-versus-everywhere-else dynamic.

A season has to reach the desk first — then the campaign math takes over

Nomination for the annual ballot isn't a public form. The High School on SI Colorado desk builds its football POY field from season-long results, much of it the same editorial pipeline that feeds the weekly polls, just weighed across an entire fall instead of one Friday. A coach or program contact who sends a season summary, not just one big game's stat line, directly to the desk gives a strong year a better shot at actually reaching the ballot instead of getting lost among six classes' worth of statewide contenders.

Once the article is live, the campaign math resembles every other free fan-vote poll on this network, just stretched over more days. Reach beats intensity. A team group chat, a booster email list, alumni who've stayed connected to the program, a school's official social accounts: running two or three of those channels together outperforms leaning on the single biggest one alone. A program that has already worked its natural network hard and still sees a real gap heading into the ballot's close sometimes turns to a vote-support service built for sports fan polls. Paced, human-pattern delivery matched to the ballot's own traffic holds up. A rapid-fire burst that reads as automated does not.

Reading the live si.com article's current terms before running any outside push is worth the two minutes it takes, since network-wide policy can shift between seasons without much notice; is buying votes legal covers that ground for fan-vote polls generally. Colorado runs comparable annual and weekly ballots for other CHSAA sports on the same hub, including Baseball Player of the Week and Boys Basketball Player of the Week; the Colorado contests directory lists what else is currently active statewide, and the general mechanics behind campaigns like this one are covered in the online contest voting guide.