Minnesota Football Player of the Week: How Voting Works & How to Win

Why Minnesota runs two SI ballots, not one

Most people land on this page assuming the football ballot and the year-round Athlete of the Week poll are the same thing. They aren't. SI Minnesota keeps a dedicated Football Player of the Week vote that runs only while the season is live, roughly ten weeks stretching from September into November. The general athlete poll keeps going through winter and spring, covering every MSHSL sport. Football gets its own lane during the fall because the volume of Friday-night performances across a state this size would otherwise crowd out everything else on a shared ballot.

That separation is the first thing worth understanding before you vote or try to rally support. A program's supporters searching for "Minnesota athlete of the week" in October may land on the wrong poll entirely and never find the football-specific ballot their nominee is actually on. Two ballots, two audiences, two rhythms. Confusing them costs a campaign real votes in a ten-week window that doesn't repeat until next fall.

For readers who want the general voting mechanics that apply across most fan-vote polls before diving into Minnesota's football-specific version, the online contest voting guide is a useful starting point.

Minnesota's football geography, and what it means for a ten-week ballot

Minnesota's prep football map is lopsided in a way that shapes this poll every single week. The Twin Cities metro (Eden Prairie, Wayzata, Maple Grove, Lakeville North, Rosemount) holds the largest single concentration of Class 6A programs and, with it, the largest pool of parents, students, and alumni checking a phone on a Sunday. Greater Minnesota runs differently. Duluth East anchors the Northland. Moorhead sits across the river from Fargo, pulling a fan base that straddles a state line. Mankato West and Rochester Century carry southern Minnesota's two largest media markets outside the metro.

A ten-week season means a program gets, at most, a handful of real shots at a nomination before the ballot goes dark for the year. That compresses the stakes. A performance in week two doesn't get a second chance if it's overlooked; the field resets weekly, and last week's near-miss is simply gone. Compare that to SI's year-round athlete poll, where a program has fifty-some weeks to eventually land a nominee. The football version offers roughly a fifth of that runway.

Because the ballot only exists during football season, the supporter networks that move it are seasonal too. A booster group that goes quiet in December reactivates in late August specifically for this poll, then goes dormant again once the last regular-season game is played. That rhythm is worth planning around if a program wants to be ready the moment a nomination lands rather than scrambling to rebuild a phone tree in week six.

What SI Minnesota confirms about the football ballot's mechanics

The mechanics SI Minnesota actually spells out fit in one short list, even though a handful of details voters might want simply aren't on the page. The ballot lives at si.com/high-school/minnesota, refreshed with a new football post every week the season runs, and nothing on the site asks a visitor to register or sign in before voting.

A running list of past winners doesn't exist anywhere searchable, and neither does an exact nominee count per week or a minute-by-minute close time; SI Minnesota simply hasn't put that information on a public page. Sister state editions tend to wrap up Sunday night, but treating that as gospel for Minnesota's football ballot would be a mistake, since bye weeks and playoff scheduling nudge both the mid-week post date and the actual close around from year to year. The live article for the current week is the only page worth trusting for that week's real deadline.

The gap in public archive data isn't unusual for a ten-week seasonal ballot; it simply means campaign planning has to run off what's visible in the live widget rather than historical benchmarks. The Minnesota contest hub tracks this ballot alongside the state's other fan-vote programs, and the legality primer is worth a read before any organized push.

Running a ten-week football campaign without burning out your network

A full football season is longer than most fan-vote windows, and that changes the calculus for a program trying to win more than once. Treating every single week like week one, maximum outreach on every channel, every time, exhausts a supporter base by October. The programs that show up on this ballot more than once tend to save their biggest pushes for the weeks a nomination actually lands, and stay quieter in between.

Because the ballot resets weekly and the season only runs ten weeks, a booster group's contact list is worth building in August, before the first kickoff, not scrambling to assemble after a Tuesday nomination email arrives. A text chain, a shared group email, a pinned post in the team's parent Facebook group: whichever channel a specific community already uses daily is faster to activate than any new tool introduced mid-season.

Metro programs with large, loosely connected alumni bases need more lead time to reach critical mass than a Greater Minnesota program with a tighter, more concentrated community. That's the same dynamic that shapes turnout across most statewide polls of this kind. Once the organic network is genuinely tapped out and a program still needs a push before the week closes, sports fan-poll vote support exists specifically for polls with a hard weekly deadline like this one. The national directory of similar contests sits at the fan-vote index, and Minnesota's wider slate of programs is at /usa/minnesota/.

How this football ballot stacks up against Minnesota's other SI polls

Minnesota carries several SI-run fan-vote programs at once, and the football ballot is the narrowest of the group. The year-round Athlete of the Week poll pulls from every MSHSL sport across three seasons. College hockey's Hobey Baker Award fan vote runs on a completely different calendar tied to the NCAA season and draws a college, not prep, audience. The football POTW sits apart from both: high school only, one sport only, one season only.

That narrowness cuts a specific way for campaigns. A supporter base built around a football program doesn't need to track four different ballots with four different rules; there's exactly one poll, one cadence, one roughly ten-week window to plan around each year. The trade-off is that missing this particular fall means waiting a full calendar year for the ballot to reopen, unlike the athlete poll, which offers a new shot most weeks regardless of season.

For programs weighing whether to build a campaign around this specific ballot versus a general community program, Minnesota's wider civic contest scene, including Minnesota's Best and regional programs like the Brainerd Lakes Area's Best of the Best, runs on entirely separate rules, sponsors, and timelines worth understanding before assuming any one poll's mechanics carry over to another.