Daily Advertiser's Offensive Player of the Year: How Voting Works & How to Win

What the Offensive Player of the Year award is and who runs it

One Lafayette newspaper hands this decision to its readers: The Daily Advertiser's Offensive Player of the Year goes to a Louisiana high school football player chosen entirely by public vote. The organizer is The Daily Advertiser, whose newsroom serves the Lafayette market and publishes at theadvertiser.com. The ballot itself lives on Crowdsignal's poll.fm hosting, the same polling host that serves several other Louisiana fan-vote programs listed further down this page.

The award is narrow by design. It recognizes offensive production only, and the 2024 ballot drew its nominees from quarterback, running back, wide receiver and tight end roles at schools including Carencro, Acadiana, Westminster Christian-Lafayette, Loreauville and Opelousas Catholic. That single-category shape separates it from the multi-nominee athlete of the week formats other Louisiana publishers run, where a fresh set of nominees appears every cycle.

The mechanic is the plainest in the genre: a supporter opens the ballot, picks a player and submits. There is no entry fee and no judging panel mentioned anywhere on the ballot page, so the result rests entirely on how many votes each nominee's community turns out.

The dated facts behind the award

The confirmed run covers two seasons, 2023 and 2024. The 2024 ballot carried the title Daily Advertiser's 2024 Offensive Player of the Year and now displays a Poll Closed label, which is how the page marks an edition that has finished accepting votes.

The window for that edition sat in November 2024, opening and closing within the month. On the result side, the closed ballot showed the leading finisher at 44,400 votes, a 49 percent share of the tally displayed, which gives a sense of the scale a single high school community can generate for this market.

No precise open day or close day has been published for either edition, no per-supporter voting frequency rule accompanies the award, and the paper has not said which year the next edition falls in; confirm on the live ballot each cycle.

Everything else about recurrence comes from the two confirmed seasons themselves. Because 2023 and 2024 both appear in the paper's own published history, the program qualifies as annual rather than as a one-off poll, but nothing later than 2024 has been announced by The Daily Advertiser in any form.

How a supporter votes on the poll.fm ballot

Voting is a short sequence. A supporter opens the ballot link, reads the nominee list for the current edition, selects the offensive player they support and taps the submit control on the ballot page. The 2024 edition, for example, listed quarterbacks, running backs, wide receivers and tight ends from schools such as Carencro, Acadiana, Westminster Christian-Lafayette, Loreauville and Opelousas Catholic.

Because the award has one category, there are no rounds to work through: the whole contest is one ballot. Once an edition closes, as the November 2024 ballot did, the page stays online and shows the final tally beside each nominee instead of accepting further votes.

The Daily Advertiser has not published a frequency rule for this award, so how often a supporter may return during an open window is set only by whatever the live ballot enforces. The same applies to eligibility text and to any nomination step before voting; none of that appears alongside the confirmed ballot.

Practical advice follows from the format itself. Supporters who want their nominee to contend should act early in the window rather than assuming a late push is enough, since one closed ballot decides the award and there is no second round to recover a slow start.

Where this award sits among Louisiana's fan-vote programs

Across Louisiana, fan-vote high school sports programs are plentiful, and this award's neighbours help explain what makes it distinct. The Baton Rouge High School Athlete of the Week and the WAFB Sportsline Player of the Week both run on a weekly rhythm tied to Baton Rouge coverage, resetting their nominee slates every cycle.

Elsewhere, the New Orleans Area High School Athlete of the Week and the New Orleans Area Prep Football Player of the Week cover the New Orleans market under their own publishers, while the Shreveport Times High School Athlete of the Week brings a second Louisiana newspaper into the weekly format. The Louisiana High School Football Player of the Week runs at statewide scope.

Against that field, The Daily Advertiser's program differs on three axes at once: it crowns a season-long winner instead of resetting weekly, it is confined to offensive production, and it answers to a single Lafayette publisher rather than a television station or a statewide roundup. A supporter moving between these ballots should treat each one as its own contest with its own window, because none of them shares a publisher, a host ballot or a schedule with the others.

Strengthening support for a nominee in this market

Support in this award is a numbers game on a single ballot, so the useful work happens while the window is open. Pass the poll.fm address directly to the nominee's school community, since the 2024 result, where the leading finisher drew 44,400 votes, shows that broad turnout rather than a handful of repeat voters decides the outcome in this market.

On outside help, The Daily Advertiser publishes no stated policy for this award either way, which means any supporter weighing purchased votes should read the organizer's live ballot text first and understand the position on whether paid voting is legal before spending anything. Our guide to getting more votes covers the mechanics that apply to plain public ballots like this Crowdsignal poll, where reach and timing decide how far a nominee climbs.