Illinois SI Football Player of the Year: How Voting Works & How to Win

Three ballots, one platform: how the football POY differs from si.com's weekly and multi-sport polls

December is an odd month to run a fan vote. Rosters have graduated their seniors, playoff runs are settled, and a good chunk of the state is thinking about final exams or holiday travel rather than a poll widget. That's exactly when High School on SI opens its Illinois Football Player of the Year ballot — the narrowest of the three fan-vote formats the same organizer runs in this state.

Two siblings exist on the identical platform. The weekly Athlete of the Week poll resets every Monday and pulls nominees from whichever IHSA sport is in season: football in the fall, then basketball, then track. A separate multi-sport annual Player of the Year hub runs one ballot per sport at that sport's own season close, with football sharing space alongside basketball, baseball, and half a dozen others under one umbrella page. This ballot is neither. It is a single-sport, single-window vote that opens once IHSA's Class 1A through 8A football championships wrap, and it closes sometime before the new year; the exact date lives inside that year's article, not on a fixed calendar date.

What the narrower scope buys is focus. A voter arriving in mid-December already knows why they clicked through: football, this season, one winner. Compare that to the multi-sport hub, where football is one tile among several sports competing for the same page. For the baseline mechanics that apply to fan-vote polls generally (caps, disqualification rules, how an embedded widget actually works), the online contest voting guide covers that before the Illinois specifics below.

What IHSA's eight football classes mean for who reaches this ballot

Illinois plays football across eight classifications, 1A through 8A, more tiers than the state uses for most other sports, which usually top out around 4A or 7A. That extra granularity exists because enrollment spans so widely: a downstate 1A program with under 200 students can sit on the same statewide ballot as an 8A suburban school fielding well over 3,000.

Programs like Mount Carmel and Brother Rice on the Chicago Catholic League Blue side, Lincoln-Way East out of the Southwest Suburban Conference, and Metro East schools such as Edwardsville and East St. Louis in the Southwestern Conference have all fielded nominees in past cycles. Classification doesn't get weighted in the vote count — a 1A program and an 8A program compete on the same tally, and the same booster-network arithmetic that decides the weekly poll decides this one too.

That's the throughline across all three SI Illinois formats: classification tells you who's eligible, not who wins. Turnout wins. For how a smaller program's tightly connected community can out-vote a much larger enrollment base, the Illinois contest hub lays out that pattern across every poll type built for the state.

The ballot mechanics — and what's genuinely unconfirmed each cycle

Here's the honest part. The exact close date moves every year, and High School on SI does not publish a standing per-click cap specific to this football ballot the way it documents for its weekly companion poll. What's confirmed is the shape of the window: it opens once Class 1A through 8A championships conclude in late November, runs through December, and typically wraps before mid-January. Treat that as the operating range, not a promise.

The vote itself works the way SBLive's other Illinois ballots do: an embedded widget inside a season-recap article at si.com/high-school/illinois, no account or email needed to click. Automated tools, scripts, macros, anything that submits faster than a person clicking a button, are barred across SBLive's Illinois properties, and a flagged pattern gets that program's tally pulled. Real supporters clicking repeatedly from their own devices is the intended use; nobody gets banned, because nobody registered an account to begin with.

That table isn't padding. It's the gap between a program that reads the current year's article closely and one that assumes last December's rules still apply. Whether paid vote support fits a poll like this depends partly on what that specific year's terms say.

Running a campaign inside a five-week holiday window

Three things make this timing harder than either sibling format. The window is short relative to a full-season buildup: weeks, not months. It lands across Thanksgiving, exam periods, and winter break, exactly when school newsletters, PA announcements, and parent email lists tend to go quiet. And because it's football-only, a program's basketball or track fans aren't a natural audience; the pool is narrower than a poll touching every sport in the building.

What actually works is front-loading. A program whose coach or athletic department pushes the direct ballot link the same week the article publishes captures attention before the holiday lull sets in. Waiting until late December to start emailing a booster list is, in practice, starting a five-week campaign with two weeks left on the clock. Chicago Catholic League programs (Mount Carmel, Brother Rice, Loyola) carry alumni networks that don't need an active season to stay engaged; a December message to a parish-rooted alumni list can still move numbers over break. Downstate and Metro East programs, without that scale, tend to lean on tighter family and church networks that respond fast but also max out sooner.

For programs that exhaust organic reach before the window closes, paid outreach to real voters is worth understanding rather than dismissing outright. A sports fan-poll vote service built around real, paced clicks rather than scripts is the relevant category here; it won't replace a mobilized community, but it can close a gap in the final days after the organic list has already been tapped.

How this ballot compares with Illinois's other reader-vote programs

The football POY ballot sits inside a wider field of Illinois reader-vote programs that have nothing to do with football specifically. The Herald-News' Joliet-area Athlete of the Week and the Herald & Review's downstate Player of the Week both run on newspaper platforms, not SI/SBLive, and both operate on weekly, not seasonal, cadences — closer cousins to si.com's own Athlete of the Week poll than to this one.

Further afield, Sauk Valley's Favorites poll and the Chicago Reader's Best of Chicago aren't sports polls at all. They're community and readers'-choice programs covering restaurants, local businesses, and city culture, and they share almost nothing mechanically with a single-sport athletic ballot beyond the basic click-and-vote format. Worth knowing anyway: a family active in one Illinois fan-vote community sometimes ends up supporting a completely different type of poll the same season, and the rules genuinely differ between a business best-of program and a school athletics ballot.

What separates the football-specific format from all four of those is scale and neutrality. It's the only one built by a national sports media brand with no local paper's regional bias, drawing from all of Illinois's IHSA member schools rather than one newspaper's circulation area. For the full slate of Illinois fan-vote programs this site tracks, the state hub and the national USA index both stay current.