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

A Tallahassee quarterback on a Panhandle ballot: the quirk that decides campaigns

Landon Dougherty threw for 366 yards and completed three touchdowns for Godby on Nov 25, 2025. Godby is in Tallahassee. Tallahassee, by every geographic measure, is Big Bend territory — Leon County, squarely at the center of the Big Bend football map. And yet Dougherty appeared on the Panhandle ballot that week, not the Big Bend ballot.

That is the structural fact that runs underneath everything else on this page. High School on SI publishes at least four simultaneous Florida regional football POTW ballots each week — Panhandle, Big Bend, Northeast Florida, Central Florida — and for schools at the geographic seams, particularly Godby and Chiles of Tallahassee, the organizer decides week by week which ballot they land on. A Godby supporter who shared the Big Bend article the week Dougherty was on the Panhandle ballot sent real votes to the wrong race.

The rule that follows from Dougherty's week is simple: read the article headline, confirm it says "Panhandle," then share that exact link. Nothing else on this page matters as much as getting the URL right before supporters start voting.

Why this poll in this stretch of Florida — and what the Nov 25 ballot shows

The November 25, 2025 ballot is the only fully confirmed Panhandle football cycle in the source data, and it is instructive precisely because of what the field looks like. Four nominees; four different community footprints; a geographic span of more than 150 miles end to end.

Thomas's entry from Blountstown is the structural surprise: a small rural program from Calhoun County, at the eastern fringe of the Panhandle, posting a three-score performance that included a 68-yard fumble return. That play is the kind of moment that circulates through a tight community fast. Blountstown's community is small in absolute terms and concentrated — which is the profile that wins fan votes against larger but more diffuse programs. A town where the school is the primary community institution can route a poll link through what amounts to a single connected network in an afternoon.

Compare that to Choctawhatchee in Ft. Walton Beach — a military-adjacent Okaloosa County school with a different, broader community structure. Brazan's defensive line (an interception and a blocked punt) earned the nod from SI's editors in a field that leaned offensive everywhere else. On a ballot decided entirely by fan turnout, the question is not whose game was more impressive — it is whose community organized first before Sunday night.

How the Panhandle poll mechanics work

The structure is straightforward once you know the one friction point — identifying the right article — and the one deadline fact that separates this poll from some of its SI siblings.

The Sunday close is the single most tactically important detail here. Unlike some SI regional ballots — including the Dallas / North Texas ballot, which runs to Monday 11:59 p.m. PT — the Panhandle poll ends Sunday night. There is no Monday recovery window. A campaign that trails heading into Sunday morning has until Sunday evening to reverse it, and that is the entire available time. Campaigns that launch outreach on Monday are voting on last week's ballot.

The 200-mile region and what it means for a real campaign

The Panhandle's geographic depth is the campaign fact that most guides skip. The region runs from Pensacola in the west — on the Alabama border — east through Ft. Walton Beach, Niceville, and Destin, then on to Panama City, and in some weeks east to Tallahassee. That is roughly 200 miles of Gulf Coast and interior Florida counties, and the communities at each end have no organic social overlap.

Tate High School in Gonzalez draws its fans from Escambia County, where Pensacola is the dominant metro and the Tate community is well-established. Choctawhatchee in Ft. Walton Beach sits in Okaloosa County, an hour and a half east — military-adjacent, with a different community structure. Blountstown is another hour-plus inland, a rural Calhoun County program where the school is the community's primary institution. These three schools were on the same November 2025 ballot, but a single campaign message broadcast across the full Panhandle without a county anchor reaches all three communities thinly and none of them effectively.

The practical structure: start with the nominee's own school community — team families, classmates, the school's own athletic accounts — then expand to the county. A Tate campaign that saturates Escambia County before reaching west toward Pensacola proper and east toward Santa Rosa will outperform a campaign that tries to blanket all of Northwest Florida at once. The Sunday close does not leave time for a slow build across 200 miles. For how weekly fan-vote campaigns generally work, the how-to guide covers the recurring mechanics, and the Florida contest hub has the full regional map of SI's Florida football polls.