Northeast Indiana Football Performance of the Week: How Voting Works & How to Win

The thing most voters don't know about this poll

The most useful fact about the Outside the Huddle Football Performance of the Week is the one that trips up every casual supporter: it closes Tuesday at 5 p.m., not Tuesday night. Five in the afternoon. That is mid-workday, mid-school-day, before most people have checked their phones a second time since lunch. If your reminder goes out Tuesday evening, the poll is already closed.

Outside the Huddle runs the vote under its Blitz football vertical, sponsored by Crazy Pinz, on a Google Forms ballot that opens Saturday after that week's games and dies at that 5 p.m. Tuesday cutoff. The hub page at outsidethehuddle.net/tag/fan-vote/ carries every ballot; each week gets its own fresh form link. An old link from a previous week's article leads to a closed ballot — worth knowing before you share anything.

AJ Streveler of Bluffton won the FAN CHOICE Performer of the Week for Week 10 in October 2025. That is the confirmed anchor. It tells you two things: Wells County programs turn out for this award when one of their own is nominated, and the poll runs deep into October when playoff seeding is still live. The Week 6 ballot was confirmed open September 27, 2025, which pins the fall season start firmly. That is what the record shows.

How Google Forms shapes the campaign

The voting mechanic matters because it is not a typical embedded widget. Google Forms records one submission per account session by default. There is no per-hour or per-day cap stated by the organizer — but each form submission is treated as one response. That creates a different strategic problem than the unlimited SI regional ballots: you can't grind from one device. You need more people, not more clicks from fewer people.

Nominations run through coaches. A stat line that never reaches [email protected] does not appear on the ballot. That makes the submission step the one thing a school can fully control — and the one step most campaigns skip. A coach who emails by Saturday night, with the full stat line, the opponent, and the score, gives the editors what they need before the form is built for that week.

Once the form is live, the work is width. The four-day window from Saturday to Tuesday 5 p.m. is short enough that a concentrated NE Indiana community can move fast — but only if the link travels through enough distinct people early. Bluffton winning Week 10 is not surprising in that context: Wells County is the kind of community where a link through one group chat reaches most of the relevant voters in an afternoon. Larger programs in Allen County have bigger absolute bases but more fragmented communications — more channels to push, more messages that don't land. In a four-day Google Forms race, that fragmentation is a real disadvantage.

For a broader view of Indiana's weekly fan votes, see the Indiana contest directory. The national hub is at /usa/. For structured support on short-window polls like this one, vote campaigns are built for exactly this timeline — four days is a tight window for organic reach alone.