Georgia High School Football Defensive Player of the Week: How Voting Works & How to Win

The one thing most voters arriving here do not know

Georgia has two established offensive Player of the Week fan polls on High School on SI — one for North Georgia, one for South Georgia — that split the state geographically. Most fans who follow those polls assume the defensive poll works the same way. It does not. The 2025 defensive ballot is statewide and undivided from the first week: Kobe King of Coahulla Creek (Walker County, northwest Georgia) and Zay Clark of Thomasville (Thomas County, deep South Georgia) were on the same opening ballot, roughly 400 road miles apart.

That structural difference matters for campaigns. On the offensive polls, you compete against programs in your region. On the defensive poll, you compete against every nominated defender in the state. A well-organized small school in Middle Georgia is on the same list as a 6A Gwinnett County program, and the race is settled purely by Sunday-night turnout across that entire geography.

The second thing worth knowing: this poll launched in August 2025. The archive of past winners is still building — there is no historical pattern to consult for typical vote counts or winning margins. What exists is the opening ballot, 15 names, and the confirmed stat lines from that first week. Hogges's 14-tackle, 5-TFL, 2-sack line is the only complete benchmark on record — it is the ceiling, not the average, and future winning lines may clear or fall short of it as more weeks accumulate.

The opening ballot — what the 15 nominees reveal

The first Georgia High School Football Defensive Player of the Week ballot ran the week of August 18, 2025, closing August 24. Fifteen nominees were confirmed statewide — the only full stat line published belongs to Kenneth Hogges of Westside-Macon:

Read the schools geographically: the 15 names span every corner of the state — northwest Georgia (Coahulla Creek), the Gwinnett corridor (Grayson, Discovery), metro Atlanta suburbs (Banneker, Stockbridge, Rockdale County), central Georgia (Westside-Macon), and deep South Georgia (Lowndes, Thomasville). That distribution is not accidental. The editors built a field that reflects the statewide scope of the ballot from week one.

Hogges's stat line is the clearest benchmark on record for what earns the lead position: a multi-category performance where no single number dominates. Fourteen tackles alone would be a strong game; five tackles for loss and two sacks alongside it signals control of a game's line of scrimmage; the interception and forced fumble mean he affected the scoreboard in both directions. That combination — volume, disruption, and turnovers — is what the 2025 opening ballot treated as the standard.

How this poll works, and what makes it different from the SI standard

The mechanics are straightforward: the ballot lives inside a weekly article at si.com/high-school/georgia, with the poll widget embedded in the text. Supporters can return and vote repeatedly until the Sunday 11:59 p.m. Pacific close — the same hard deadline that the statewide Texas polls share, and notably earlier than the SI regional Texas polls that close Monday.

Two things make this ballot different from other SI high school football polls in Georgia. First, it is defensive-only — a position group that rarely leads fan-vote recognition anywhere gets its own dedicated stage each week. In 2024, before this poll existed, a defender making a Georgia POTW ballot was exceptional: Corey Howard of Valdosta (13 tackles, 3 sacks) appeared on the South Georgia offensive ballot in what the editors treated as a cross-position exception. The 2025 dedicated ballot normalizes defensive recognition rather than treating it as a footnote.

Second, the closing day is Sunday — same as the statewide Texas polls, but different from the SI regional Texas polls that close Monday. That means the decisive voting window for Georgia's defensive ballot runs Saturday night through Sunday. Supporters who assume there is a Monday extension — because they have heard that about other SI regional polls — are mistaken about this one. Sunday night is the hard close.

Because the archive is one season deep, there is no confirmed pattern for what vote share wins in a 15-name field. What the structure tells you is that concentration of effort matters: on a ballot where 15 communities split the vote, a school that moves together — teammates voting through the week, a single clear message passed through the booster network — will pull ahead of schools where the link circulates but the ask is passive. Kenneth Hogges's opening-week line (14 tackles, 5 TFL, 2 sacks, 1 INT, 1 FF) established a high bar; the campaign that wins is the one that matches that effort in organizing before Sunday night. For campaigns where reach proves insufficient, vote-support options exist for weekly fan polls like this one.