The Daily News Gridiron Fan Picks: How Voting Works & How to Win

Two confirmed editions, and a 2026 window running August 22 through November 6

Two years is the entire confirmed run of Gridiron Fan Picks: an edition in 2025, and the one open right now through November 6, 2026. The Daily News organizes it on the Second Street platform, listed at thedailynews2.secondstreetapp.com and mirrored at thedailynews.cc.secondstreetapp.com/fanpicks, covering the paper's own Montcalm County and Ionia County, Michigan readership.

The 2026 window opened August 22. Past that date, what's actually published goes quiet fast: no category roster exists, no vote cap is stated, and no eligibility rule appears anywhere on the confirmed listing.

Treat that last row honestly. Confirm on the live ballot each cycle, because a program only two editions deep hasn't settled into a fixed pattern the way some Second Street markets elsewhere already have.

One organizer's Second Street account, running several separate ballots

The Daily News doesn't run Gridiron Fan Picks alone on this Second Street account. Lowell Ledger Best of the Best, a readers'-choice ballot answering to a different masthead entirely, shares the same platform login, and a handful of quarterly sweepstakes cycle through the identical feed. None of those other listings share a results page or a judging pool with Gridiron Fan Picks itself.

What that means for a push happening right now

A search for "Michigan fan picks" has a real chance of surfacing one of the six programs above, an unrelated sweepstakes on the same platform account, or an outdated listing from a prior season, none of which help a Montcalm or Ionia County entry. Only August 22 through November 6 is locked in for 2026; whatever comes after stays unpublished until thedailynews2.secondstreetapp.com itself says otherwise.

Montcalm County, Ionia County, and the larger Michigan cities nearby

Greenville sits inside Montcalm County, and Ionia, the seat of its own county, lies a short drive south. Together the two counties make up the readership The Daily News names directly on its own masthead, a stretch of west-central Michigan without a single large city of its own.

Grand Rapids, well to the west, and Lansing, to the southeast, are the two larger markets a Montcalm or Ionia County business realistically also competes in for attention day to day. Nothing on the Gridiron Fan Picks listing draws a hard boundary around either county; it's simply how this part of Michigan sits together.

A supporter working or shopping across that county line has no obvious reason to assume a ballot naming both counties shuts them out. The live page, not a guess about where the boundary falls, is what actually settles eligibility once that question comes up.

Building a push around two editions, not a decade of past results

With just two editions confirmed, a Montcalm or Ionia County supporter has little past history to lean on here, so the smarter approach is working the window that's already locked in rather than waiting on a pattern this program hasn't built yet. Line up who will actually click through before November 6, and follow up with that same group again closer to the deadline instead of counting on name recognition alone.

None of that changes once The Daily News eventually decides what, if anything, comes after this window closes. Genuine fans, contacted directly and more than once, are what actually shifts a ballot this new, regardless of what shape a later stage takes. Second Street's own screening applies to every market on its platform, and getting flagged there lands harder on a two-edition program than it would on one with ten confirmed seasons already behind it.

Getting a name onto the ballot is one step; The Daily News alone decides what happens once its own count finishes. Is buying votes legal draws the line between an ordinary support push and a riskier one, and award-vote campaign planning is built around a fan-vote shape like Gridiron Fan Picks' own.