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

Idaho football splits five ways before a single Player of the Year vote is cast

Basketball, track, and wrestling run under a six-tier Idaho classification system, 6A down through 1A Division II. Football doesn't follow that map. The Idaho High School Activities Association fields five classifications for football specifically, 5A through 1A, and each one names its own all-state team before anyone gets near a statewide Player of the Year ballot. That split is the detail most outsiders miss, and it's why a 1A program from a town of a few thousand people can land on the same nominee list as a 5A Treasure Valley school many times its size.

MaxPreps tracks the season underneath all five classes, box score by box score, and its recruiting-service star ratings occasionally flag something a state this size doesn't produce often: a 5-star offensive or defensive lineman. Line play rarely drives a fan-vote campaign the way a quarterback's touchdown count does. A 5-star grade from a national recruiting service reaches people well outside Idaho, though, and it changes who gets talked about once the Player of the Year conversation opens each winter. For how Idaho's year-round fan-vote programs fit together, the Idaho contest hub lays out the full set; the all-sport Idaho Player of the Year guide covers platform mechanics shared across every sport-specific ballot.

What MaxPreps and SI Idaho actually confirm about the football ballot

Two organizations sit behind this award, and they don't do the same job. MaxPreps compiles Idaho football statistics and syndicated recruiting-service ratings all season — the database where a 5-star lineman grade shows up. High School on SI, the Sports Illustrated prep vertical built from the former SBLive Sports platform, runs the actual fan-vote article at si.com/high-school/idaho once the postseason wraps. The nominee pool draws from the five classifications' all-state teams; the winner is decided by public vote on SI's page, not by MaxPreps' rankings alone.

Some of that is nailed down. Some of it needs a live check before anyone builds a campaign timeline around it.

Naming that gap directly beats guessing at a cap number that might not hold from one football season to the next. The wider mechanics of how SI/MaxPreps-style fan polls typically operate are covered in the online contest voting guide; Idaho's weekly counterpart, the Idaho High School Athlete of the Week poll, runs on the same si.com platform with its own separate structure.

How five all-state teams turn into one statewide vote

The sequence starts on the field, not on a website. IHSAA football wraps with state championships in each of the five classes, typically in November. Coaches' and media panels then finalize that class's all-state team, offense, defense, and sometimes a separate honorable-mention tier, independent of what MaxPreps' stat lines or recruiting grades say. Five classes, five all-state rosters, published on five different timelines depending on how quickly each class's championship game gets played.

Only after that does the Player of the Year conversation open. High School on SI and MaxPreps pull nominees from those five rosters, and this is where the recruiting angle actually matters: a 5-star-rated lineman who protected a 5A quarterback all season, or anchored a 2A run defense, gets weighed against skill-position nominees whose stat lines are easier to summarize in a headline. That's a real tension in how these fan votes get framed: box scores favor the ball-carrier, recruiting grades don't care what position a player lines up at. For the underlying tactics that apply to any open Idaho fan poll, the how-to guide library covers pacing and outreach; the legal framing around outside vote support is covered fairly at is buying votes legal.

Which Idaho football communities actually move a statewide vote

Treasure Valley's 5A cluster (Rocky Mountain, Mountain View, Eagle, Centennial, Bishop Kelly) sits inside roughly a twenty-minute drive across Meridian, Eagle, and Boise. That density means large enrollment numbers and a Boise media market that already pays attention to prep football most Friday nights each fall. Getting a nominee's name in front of people there is the easy part. Getting a distracted metro audience to actually click through and vote, and to keep coming back if the live rules allow repeat visits, is harder.

North Idaho works on a different scale. Coeur d'Alene, Lake City, and Post Falls sit close enough that a rivalry week pulls fans from all three towns onto the same coverage, and the Spokane media market spilling across the state line gives Panhandle nominees reach a Treasure Valley program doesn't get for free. District VI, down in Southeast Idaho (Rigby, Madison in Rexburg, Pocatello, Sugar-Salem in Sugar City), runs through tighter community structures: booster group texts and congregation networks that can put a nominee's name in front of most of the realistic voter pool in an evening, regardless of the school's classification.

That geography matters more for a lineman than a running back. A skill-position nominee often has a highlight clip doing the marketing for them. A 5-star offensive tackle needs a coach, a booster club, or a hometown paper actively explaining why the grade matters, because the stat sheet alone won't do it. Idaho runs other statewide fan-vote programs built on that same local-network logic outside football, including Best of Greater Idaho Falls and the Best of Magic Valley Readers' Choice poll.

Getting a lineman's name on the ballot, then running the window

Nomination for these five all-state rosters runs through each classification's coaches' association, not a public form. A program's head coach typically submits film, stats, and a case for inclusion to the panel covering that class. MaxPreps' recruiting-grade data updates separately, through whichever national service (247Sports, Rivals, or similar) a family or program has connected with; it isn't something a fan campaign can influence directly.

Once the fan-vote article goes live on si.com/high-school/idaho, the campaign work is entirely about reach. Send the poll link itself, not merely a mention of the player's name, into team group texts, the booster club's email list, and the school's own social feeds. A 2A or 3A program with a tight-knit community can move fast on a short timeline. A 5A program has more raw numbers but a more diffuse network to activate. Either way, sharing the actual article URL removes the friction of someone having to search for it themselves.

Not every push closes the gap through word of mouth alone. Once a booster club has run through texts, emails, and social posts with the ballot still open, a paid vote-support service becomes the next lever some Idaho programs reach for. See sports fan poll votes for how paced delivery is built to sit inside a platform's own rules rather than push against them. Idaho runs two other weekly ballots on the same si.com infrastructure worth knowing for comparison: the Boys Athlete of the Week and Girls Athlete of the Week polls, both running under separate, shorter voting windows than this annual football award.