Florida Big Bend High School Football Player of the Week: How Voting Works & How to Win

Lazarus Chambers ran 33 times and threw 25 passes in the same game — and still shared a ballot

Start with the October ballot's most eye-catching line. Lazarus Chambers of Godby ran 33 carries for 201 yards and also went 13-of-25 for 205 pass yards, collecting three touchdowns in a single game. Over 400 combined yards of offense in a high school game is not routine, and it still did not clear the field. Karlise Price of Rickards scored four rushing touchdowns on the same ballot. Bez Glanton of Taylor County hit four passing touchdowns on 16-of-22 throwing. Alex Assantes of Chiles returned an interception 85 yards for a touchdown and also had a fumble recovery touchdown on defense.

That is what the Oct 28, 2025 Big Bend ballot actually looked like — six nominees, four of them from Leon County's major Tallahassee programs, two from coastal bend schools more than an hour's drive from the capital. A dual-threat performance worth 400 combined yards did not dominate the discussion because the week happened to be rich across the entire region. The winner of that cycle is not documented in the confirmed facts, which means the outcome of one of Florida prep football's more interesting weekly ballots was determined by fan votes — not by any obvious statistical standout.

That is the first thing to understand about this poll: on a week where the data is close, the community behind each nominee matters more than the stat line in front of it.

Tallahassee, the coastal counties, and why this poll's geography is unusual

The Big Bend is named for the distinctive curve where Florida's Gulf coast bends westward — the place where the peninsula stops pointing south and the coastline runs toward the Panhandle. The High School on SI football poll that carries the name centers on Tallahassee and extends into the counties that form the bend: Wakulla directly south, Taylor southeast toward Perry, Franklin on the coast at Carrabelle, Madison east toward the Georgia line.

That geography produces an unusual poll structure. Four of the six confirmed Oct 28 nominees came from Leon County programs in Tallahassee — Rickards, Godby, Lincoln, Chiles — all within about fifteen miles of each other. The other two came from Perry (Taylor County, 70 miles southeast) and Carrabelle (Franklin County, 80 miles south on the coast). On the same ballot: a state capital city with two universities and a civic professional class, and a coastal fishing community with a school small enough that a single exceptional individual performance is the realistic path to a nomination.

Tallahassee is Florida's state capital and home to Florida State University and Florida A&M University — two institutions whose alumni and staff networks extend well beyond the metro. A Leon County program reaching into FSU or FAMU alumni groups is reaching a population that spans the entire state, not just Tallahassee. A rural coastal-bend program has no equivalent extended network, but it has something different: a tight community where every adult who has ever attended a Friday night game is reachable through two or three social connections. Maddox Shaw's 217-yard rushing game is the kind of performance that activates that community completely.

The Tallahassee programs also face a specific complication: Godby and Chiles are the two schools confirmed in the source facts as appearing on both the Big Bend poll and the Panhandle poll in different 2025 weeks. Supporters of any Godby or Chiles athlete need to identify which ballot their player is on before sharing — a link to the Panhandle poll helps nobody in a Big Bend week, and vice versa.

Poll mechanics and what Sunday close means for the outreach window

The poll lives inside an article on si.com/high-school/florida, not on a standalone voting page. Each week the editors publish a new Big Bend nomination post and embed the voting widget inside it. The current week's article has its own URL; the Oct 28 confirmed URL is documented in this guide's contest fields. Future weeks generate new URLs. The hub at si.com/high-school/florida is where to find the latest.

The Sunday close distinguishes this poll from the SI Texas regional polls, which run to Monday night. Here the decisive hours are Friday through Sunday. That window shapes the outreach differently: there is no Monday grace period to fall back on. A campaign that posts Sunday morning and again Sunday afternoon is working the real closing pressure. One that waits until Monday morning has missed it.

Because SI runs multiple Florida regional football polls simultaneously, the one structural friction point in this poll is headline confirmation. Share the Big Bend article URL directly — not a screenshot, not the Florida hub homepage. Supporters who click a link that lands on the Panhandle ballot and vote there will not see that vote reflected on the Big Bend result. The article URL is the only unambiguous share.

Running a campaign from Tallahassee to the coast

The Big Bend poll is won by reach, and the geography here is an asset for the right campaign. Tallahassee is a compact city by Florida standards — about 200,000 in the metro — but its population is unusually networked. State government, FSU, and FAMU create professional and alumni communities where school loyalty travels far. A parent who works at the Capitol and texts a Leon County booster group has indirect reach into networks that span the whole state. That is not available to most comparably sized Florida markets.

The coastal-bend programs work differently. Franklin County's Carrabelle and Taylor County's Perry are small communities where the football program is often the most prominent shared civic institution. A nominee from either school activates that community at a density that Tallahassee's dispersed metro cannot match per capita. Maddox Shaw's 217-yard night for Franklin County is the kind of individual performance that has an entire town forwarding the same article. The campaign for a small coastal-bend nominee is not about breadth — it is about reaching everyone in the county before the Sunday close.

For either type of program, the campaign starts with the direct article URL shared at the moment of publication. Because two 2025 cycles are confirmed (September and October), the poll runs across the full regular season and into the playoffs. Watching the SI Florida hub from August onward is the only reliable way to catch a nomination the moment it posts — a great game that gets a nomination on Thursday that nobody shares until Saturday has already surrendered two of the five days in the window. For campaigns that need to close a gap before Sunday, structured vote support is built for exactly this format and timeline.