The Preseason Football Player of the Year Around Springfield: How Voting Works & How to Win

What the Preseason Football Player of the Year Around Springfield is and who runs it

The State Journal-Register asks Springfield-area readers to pick the region's top football player before a single snap of the new season is played, running the vote on Crowdsignal at poll.fm. This preseason honor covers the sport vertical for Illinois football, and its own name sets the scope: the area around Springfield, Illinois, not the city alone and not one school's roster.

Unlike a poll that reopens every week through a season, this one is a once-a-year preseason call, posted in August and closed well before the games themselves settle the question a different way.

What the confirmed page supports stays inside that frame: a preseason honor, posted once a year, by The State Journal-Register, for the region around Springfield. A specific school roster sits outside what is published there.

The dated history behind the Springfield preseason ballot

The Preseason Football Player of the Year Around Springfield shows confirmed editions in 2023 and 2025. Two confirmed years is enough for the honor to count as annual, though the gap between them is unexplained by anything published, so the run stands at 2023 and 2025 and unproven in between.

The 2025 edition posted in August, ahead of that year's season, matching the "preseason" framing printed right in the program's own name. Whether every edition lands in that same month is not stated beyond what the 2025 ballot itself shows.

The State Journal-Register has not published a category count, a per-voter limit, or exact open and close dates for this preseason ballot; confirm on the live ballot each cycle. For a once-a-year vote like this one, that gap matters less than it would on a weekly series, since there is only one window to watch for rather than a new one every week.

How a supporter votes on the poll.fm preseason ballot

A supporter opens poll.fm/15926703 while the August window is live, reads the field of nominees Crowdsignal displays for that year's edition, and selects the one they want to back. No sign-in prompt and no write-in box appear on the published ballot; a visitor chooses and submits directly.

Because the honor is a single yearly call rather than a running series, the mechanic itself is simpler than a weekly poll's: one ballot, one August window, one closed result once the season actually begins. The 15926703 address is the 2025 edition, already closed.

Nothing published states whether The State Journal-Register plans to reuse the same poll.fm address for a future August or issue a fresh one. Its own sports section, rather than a bookmarked link from a past year, is the more reliable way to find whichever edition is currently open.

How this Springfield ballot sits beside Illinois' other football polls

Illinois carries several separate high school football vote programs, and the Springfield preseason poll is the one built around a single yearly pick rather than a weekly cycle.

None of those five programs post a joint vote count or a shared results page with the Springfield preseason poll. A strong August showing here changes nothing on a weekly ballot elsewhere in the state, since each program keeps its own separate tally on its own separate schedule.

Building support before next August's Springfield ballot

Because the honor posts once a year, a supporter cannot rely on a weekly reminder to keep momentum going the way a season-long poll allows. Reaching real Springfield-area readers during the August window itself, rather than after the ballot has already closed, is what actually matters for a once-a-year format.

The State Journal-Register has not stated its own position on outside campaign help for this preseason ballot, so is buying votes legal is worth reading before planning any push. Sports fan-poll vote support, including ours, is built around exactly this kind of dated, single-window poll as much as a weekly one.