The Bulletin Preseason Football Player of the Year: How Voting Works & How to Win

What The Bulletin Preseason Football Player of the Year is and who runs it

The Bulletin, a Connecticut newspaper published online at norwichbulletin.com, runs the Preseason Football Player of the Year ballot. It is a fan vote on high school football, asked before the season starts, and it belongs to the sport vertical on this site. The program's full question reads "Who is The Bulletin preseason football player of the year?", and that single question is the whole ballot.

Crowdsignal, the balloting host behind poll.fm, carries the paper's preseason question. The live ballot address is poll.fm/15989949, and that page is where each September edition appears. The format is a straightforward fan vote: a supporter picks a nominee from the list and submits, with no purchase or entry fee involved.

The market is Connecticut. The Bulletin is the Norwich-registered paper behind the vote, and the nominees on past ballots come from high school programs across the state, which is how the poll identifies its audience: football supporters deciding which player deserves the preseason tag before any games have been played.

The dated history of the preseason football poll

Three editions of the paper's preseason football poll are confirmed: 2022, 2024 and 2025. The recurrence data marks the program annual, with a next expected run in 2026, and every confirmed edition has been anchored to September, with the whole window falling inside that month.

The clearest dated fact comes from the 2024 edition. The Bulletin's own coverage of that poll stated, "The poll will remain open until Friday, Sept. 13 at noon." That gives the 2024 edition a hard close: midday on September 13, 2024. No equivalent open date or closing deadline has been printed for any other edition of the preseason poll.

The rulebook is the part The Bulletin leaves unpublished. The paper prints no per-supporter vote limit, no eligibility rule and no open date for the coming edition of the preseason football poll; confirm on the live ballot each cycle. The ballot page itself carries no rules text beyond the question and the nominee list, so frequency and eligibility are questions only the live poll can answer once it opens.

Because the 2024 ballot is marked closed, the poll.fm address currently shows a finished edition rather than a live one. The next ballot will appear at the same platform when the paper posts it for the coming season.

How a supporter votes on the poll.fm preseason ballot

The ballot is a single-question page. It opens with the question, lists the nominees underneath, and accepts a selection through the standard poll.fm radio buttons. Each nominee is paired with a Connecticut high school program, so the list reads as player and school together: Killingly and NFA are among the schools that appeared on the 2024 edition, alongside other programs from around the state.

A supporter scans the list, marks the nominee they want, and presses the submit control beneath the school entries. The page does not display a write-in field for this question, so the choice is limited to the printed nominees. No login screen sits in front of the list, and the ballot page prints no instruction about returning on later days, which means the paper has left the frequency question unstated rather than publishing a daily rule.

The tally is public. When the 2024 edition closed, the leading nominee held 26 percent of the vote on 359 votes, with the rest of the field trailing behind. That visible count is the main feedback supporters get, and it is also how anyone can check the result after the poll closes.

For the current cycle, the 2024 ballot shows as closed, so the literal action a supporter takes today is to wait for the paper to post the next preseason poll and repeat the same selection step on the fresh page.

Where this ballot sits among Connecticut's player votes

Connecticut carries a cluster of high school sports fan votes, and this page's neighbours show the range. The Connecticut High School Football Player of the Week ballot runs on the same sport but refreshes weekly during the season, while the Connecticut Gatorade Football Player of the Year is a season-ending award with a different organizer behind it.

The Bulletin's preseason poll differs from both in timing and shape. It is asked before games begin, it is a single annual question rather than a weekly series, and it is run by the paper itself on Crowdsignal rather than by a state coaching body or a drink brand. That preseason slot is its identity: the vote names a player of the year before any Friday night has been played.

The same paper-market pattern repeats in other sports on this site: the basketball player of the week, the baseball player of the week, and the boys and girls lacrosse weekly ballots each cover their own sport for the state. A supporter following several of them will recognize the format, but each program answers to its own organizer and its own window.

What makes this one worth watching separately is the September slot. When the preseason poll goes live it is the earliest football fan vote of the Connecticut calendar, and it closes quickly, which is why the noon deadline on the 2024 edition mattered to anyone organizing support.

Strengthening support for a nominee in the preseason poll

The mechanic a supporter controls is simple: the ballot is a public poll.fm page, so every vote the nominee receives has to come through that link. The practical work is distribution. Circulate the poll.fm address itself rather than a screenshot, put it in front of the team's parent group, the school's booster channels and local football pages, and get every parent and teammate to mark their nominee the moment the poll opens, because the September window is short and the 2024 edition shut at midday on its closing date.

Where purchased support stands with The Bulletin is unstated: the paper has published no rule about bought or automated votes for this preseason poll, and the ballot page carries no terms beyond the question. That silence cuts both ways, since it gives no published assurance either. The general rules question is covered on the legality page, and the tactics that fit a short-window newspaper poll are laid out in the votes guide. Whatever route a campaign takes, the tally on the ballot page is the only scoreboard, and it updates as votes land.