Daily Telegram Preseason Football Player of the Year: How Voting Works & How to Win

What the Daily Telegram Preseason Football Player of the Year is

This preseason award from The Daily Telegram, a Michigan newspaper, is settled entirely by fan voting. It sits in the sports vertical and, as the name says, is decided before the season rather than after it: the publisher puts up a slate of preseason nominees and lets readers determine the winner.

The voting runs on Crowdsignal, the host behind poll.fm, at the address poll.fm/14218709. Crowdsignal ballots of this kind show the nominee list, a set of selectable options, and a running tally that displays each option's percentage and raw vote count. On the confirmed edition, the results display showed a Hudson nominee leading with 39 percent of 8,616 votes.

Nominees come from towns inside the paper's home coverage area, and the published ballot pairs each player with his school. Schools from Adrian, Hudson, Clinton, Blissfield and Addison appear on the confirmed slate, with Hudson holding two of the top positions and Clinton one. Every nominee is a high school athlete, so schools and towns are named here but individual players are not.

The quick facts below pull together the confirmed details in one place.

The dated facts: editions, window and what is missing

Two editions are on file, in 2023 and 2024, both falling in August. That two-year run is what gives the program its annual shape, though the publisher has not yet said when the next edition lands. The ballot for the most recent edition is now marked closed, so anyone landing on poll.fm/14218709 today sees a finished result rather than a live vote.

The dated window is the strongest fact here. The confirmed edition ran Aug. 24 through midnight Thursday, Aug. 27, an opening on a Monday and a close at midnight on a Thursday. That four-day span is short by fan-vote standards and it shapes everything about how a campaign for a nominee has to be planned, since there is no long runway to build on.

Some details are simply absent from the ballot. The organizer prints no category list, no per-voter limit, no eligibility text and no statement about outside help, and no announcement about the next edition year has appeared. For the category roster, the vote cap and the rules text, confirm on the live ballot each cycle. Whatever cannot be quoted here stays unstated rather than guessed.

One structural point is worth separating: rather than a weekly series, this is a once-per-season award settled in the preseason. Some Michigan publishers instead settle a player of the week, fresh each round through the fall. The Daily Telegram's confirmed slate shows a single August window per edition, not a string of weekly rounds, and 2023 and 2024 are the only years with published evidence.

How a supporter votes today

Voting takes three short moves. The supporter loads the poll at poll.fm/14218709, scans the nominee list where each player is shown with his school, ticks one option, and sends it through the on-page control. Crowdsignal ballots then show the live standings, with a percentage and a vote count beside each option, so a supporter can see immediately whether the choice moved the number.

On the confirmed edition the standings told a clear story: the leading nominee, from Hudson, finished at 39 percent on 8,616 votes, a second Hudson nominee held 30 percent on 6,603 votes, and a Clinton nominee ran at 6 percent. Those published figures are the only tally numbers connected to this program, and they come from the closed 2024 ballot.

What the ballot leaves out matters as much as what it shows. Nothing on the poll describes repeat voting, a daily-return habit or a sign-in step, and the text nowhere says whether one individual may cast a vote on several different days across the window. The confirmed window itself ran only Aug. 24 through midnight Thursday, Aug. 27, so a supporter hoping to return on multiple days has very few days in which to do it.

Because the 2024 ballot is closed, a first-time supporter today cannot vote on it at all. The practical sequence is to watch The Daily Telegram for its next preseason slate, open the new poll.fm ballot when it appears, and vote inside that edition's own window, which will be printed on the new ballot when it exists.

How this ballot sits beside its Michigan neighbours

Michigan has a busy fan-vote scene for high school football, and this program holds an unusual place within it. The neighbours listed alongside it are weekly ballots: the MLive votes for the Bay City and Kalamazoo areas, the Flint-area vote, the Jackson-area vote, the Ann Arbor-area vote, and the High School on SI Michigan athlete ballot. Each of those recurs through the season with a fresh winner every round.

The Daily Telegram's award works differently. It is a preseason, per-year vote: it opens in August, settles before the games begin, and crowns one player of the year by fan choice rather than a new winner each week. Its coverage area is also narrower. The nominee schools come from Adrian, Hudson, Clinton, Blissfield, Addison and Tecumseh, a cluster of towns where The Daily Telegram is the local paper, rather than a metro region or the whole state.

Platform-wise it fits the same pattern as many of its neighbours, running on Crowdsignal with a public tally, so a supporter used to one Michigan football poll will recognize the format instantly. If you are mapping fan votes across the state, the weekly ballots linked from this page and this preseason award complement each other rather than compete, and each carries its own publisher's rules and window.

Strengthening support for a nominee in this preseason vote

The short window is the defining constraint. With the confirmed edition running Aug. 24 through midnight Thursday, Aug. 27, a supporter has only a handful of days, so a plan that waits for the closing stretch is already late. The opening day matters most, because an early lead on a ballot that shows a live percentage tends to hold attention and draw shares from the school community.

Work the obvious channels for a high school nominee: the school's own parent and student groups, local social media pages for towns like Adrian, Hudson, Clinton and Blissfield, and any team group chats. Since the ballot displays a percentage and vote count, asking people to look at the standing and pass it on gives them a reason to return. Nothing the organizer publishes addresses outside help, so a supporter who wants to go beyond organic asks should read The Daily Telegram's own rules first, and the background page on award-style votes explains how these ballots differ from business contests.