Friday Night Drive Team Of The Week Playoffs: How Voting Works & How to Win

What the Friday Night Drive Team of the Week Playoffs is and who runs it

The Friday Night Drive Team Of The Week Playoffs is the postseason edition of a Team of the Week honor that the Daily Chronicle (Illinois) publishes under its Friday Night Drive banner. Friday Night Drive is the newsroom's Illinois high school football coverage, and the Team of the Week format asks readers to pick the school whose performance deserves the honor. During the playoffs the ballot tracks the postseason, so the 2025 ballot on file is titled for Round 1 of the 2025 playoffs.

The voting itself runs on Second Street, the engagement platform many newspapers use for polls and contests. The publisher's tenant sits at shawlocal.secondstreetapp.com, and the confirmed Round 1 ballot lives at the URL listed in the facts table below. The ballot page presents a straightforward public vote: a list of schools, a choice, a submission.

Vertically the program is a best-of contest, but a narrow one. Its subject is high school football, its audience is the communities that follow those teams, and its calendar is the Illinois playoff calendar. The organizer's own reporting describes an editor narrowing a long list of nominated players down before creating the voting ballot in Second Street, which explains why the ballot is a curated school list rather than an open write-in.

The dated record: which editions ran and when the 2025 window fell

Confirmed editions of the Friday Night Drive Team of the Week playoffs ballot exist for 2022, 2023, 2024 and 2025. That span makes the playoffs Team of the Week a recurring fixture of the Illinois high school football postseason, not a single-season experiment, and it aligns with the organizer's coverage of the Team of the Week for Round 1 of the 2025 playoffs as part of that season's cycle. A 2026 season edition is the natural next one given the pattern.

The dated window confirmed for this page belongs to the 2025 playoffs Round 1 ballot. Its voting round opened on November 2, 2025, and the ballot page stated that voting ends at 8 p.m. Monday, which places the close on November 3, 2025. That pairing of a weekend opening and an 8 p.m. Monday deadline matches the rhythm the organizer's season voting notices describe for the weekly series.

The rest of the picture stays unwritten. The ballot page for Round 1 carries no complete playoff round schedule for the weeks that follow, and it prints no category breakdown beyond the school list, so details beyond the November window are something to confirm on the live ballot each cycle. The same page prints no vote cap and no eligibility rule, and the organizer has not published those terms anywhere else in the material available.

How a supporter votes on the Friday Night Drive playoff ballot today

The mechanic is a direct public vote on the Second Street ballot. A supporter opens the round's ballot page, sees the schools paired in that playoff round, selects a favorite and submits. The organizer's own notice for the series puts it plainly: choose your favorite school and submit your vote by the deadline printed on the page. No nomination step, no judging panel and no entry form stand between the supporter and the count.

Two constraints shape the action. The organizer's voting notices describe a format of a single vote from each person each day for the Team of the Week, which means a supporter who wants to keep backing a school returns daily while the round is open. The deadline matters just as much: the confirmed Round 1 ballot closed with voting ending at 8 p.m. Monday, so votes cast after the close do not carry into the result.

Because each playoff round gets its own ballot, a school eliminated in one round leaves the ballot, and new pairings replace it in the next. A supporter following a team through a deep playoff run therefore repeats the same short action, round after round, on whatever page the organizer publishes for that week. The ballot itself is the source of truth for the list and the deadline in force at any moment.

How this ballot sits beside its Illinois neighbours

Illinois carries several public-vote programs on this site, and the Friday Night Drive Team Of The Week Playoffs is the one built entirely around high school football. Its neighbours answer to different organizers and different formats. The BAGI Parade of Homes People's Choice honors homebuilders, the Sauk Valley Favorites survey runs a broad readership ballot in the Sterling area, and the Best of Chicago (Chicago Reader) covers a metro readership at far larger scale.

The remaining siblings broaden the picture further. The Chicago Style Weddings Best Of ballot serves the wedding market, while CommunityVotes Peoria IL and CommunityVotes Rockford run city-wide community favorites under a national franchise format. Each has its own publisher, its own category structure and its own calendar, so a vote in any of them is separate from the Friday Night Drive count.

What distinguishes the playoff Team of the Week within this set is its cadence and its narrowness. Instead of an annual multi-category survey, it publishes a fresh ballot for every playoff round across 2022, 2023, 2024 and 2025, and instead of dozens of business categories it honors schools for on-field performance. For a school community, that means the competition on any given ballot is only the other teams playing that round, which changes the shape of any support effort compared with a city-wide best-of race.

Strengthening support within the Friday Night Drive playoff rules

Support for a school in this ballot is a rhythm problem, not a single push. The confirmed mechanic allows a daily return under the organizer's stated format of one ballot choice per supporter per day, and each round closes at the deadline printed on its page, 8 p.m. Monday in the confirmed Round 1 case. A school community that organizes a daily reminder through the round collects more counted votes than one that rallies only near the close.

The organizer's printed rules are the boundary. The Daily Chronicle (Illinois) ballot is a plain public vote, and the terms that govern what counts are the ones published with each round's ballot page. Anything outside those terms risks the votes cast, so keep the effort inside them: real supporters, voting themselves, each day the round is open. The site's page on building online support at growing a vote total the honest way and its summary of the legal position at the legality question both start from that same principle.