Tennessee High School Football Player of the Week: How Voting Works & How to Win

The thing most voters do not realize about this ballot

The Tennessee Football Player of the Week poll is statewide, which sounds obvious until you sit with what it means for campaign math. A nominee from Bartlett — a Memphis suburb of more than 60,000 — lands on the same ballot as a nominee from Unaka, a school in Carter County with a student body measured in the hundreds. Both draw from entirely different corners of the state. The Aug 27, 2024 ballot confirmed exactly this: Geron Johnson from Bartlett and Brynin Repass from Unaka were on the same ten-name list.

That geography gap is the central fact of this poll. In regional polls — like the Dallas / North Texas ballot, which covers one metro — most nominees pull from overlapping communities, and voters personally know multiple names on the list. In Tennessee the nominees may be 400 miles apart. A voter in Knoxville who does not know anyone at Shelbyville Central is not going to vote for that nominee. Which means a program in any corner of the state starts with a committed local base and nothing beyond it — and building beyond that base, fast, before Sunday 11:59 p.m., is the actual contest.

The second thing worth stating plainly: this is a Sunday close, not Monday. The Dallas / North Texas regional poll runs an extra day; Tennessee does not. The decisive window is Friday night through Sunday evening — the same weekend the games are still being processed and talked about, which is both the best and shortest activation window of any poll in this file set.

What the confirmed 2024 results reveal about the ballot's character

Four confirmed 2024 winners — three named in published poll articles as prior-week recipients — establish something important: this ballot is not dominated by the state's enrollment giants. Oakland (Murfreesboro) went 15–0 in 2025 and holds the top statewide power rating; Maryville and Brentwood Academy are perennial playoff programs. None of them are in the confirmed winner list from the 2024 polls on record.

Instead: Kaleb Johnson of Knoxville Catholic, a Division II AAA private school, won with a defensive performance — 14 tackles, 4 tackles for loss, 3 sacks — over a field that included Division I public programs. Xavier Randolph of Giles County, a county-seat school in Pulaski, won going 14-for-19 with 313 passing yards and 4 touchdowns. D'andre Hundley of Austin-East, a Nashville public school with a historically small enrollment, won with 8 tackles and 3 sacks on a ballot that included Amari Cotton of Jo Byrns, who had posted 422 rushing yards on 14 carries the same week.

Read those together: a private-school defensive player beat a public-school field; a county seat in southern Middle Tennessee beat programs with larger enrollment; a defensive stat line beat one of the most explosive offensive outputs in the confirmed data set. The common thread is that all three won schools with tight community networks — Knoxville Catholic's alumni base, Giles County's Pulaski-centered community, Austin-East's East Nashville identity — that could consolidate around one name fast. That is the actual structural pattern the data confirms, not school size.

The division column matters here in a way it would not in an enrollment-gated contest. TSSAA's Division II is for private and independent schools — a separate track from the enrollment-based D-I classes 1A through 6A. Knoxville Catholic winning a poll that also included public schools from around the state is not a quirk; it is how this ballot is designed to work. Fan turnout is the only separator.

Running a campaign across a state this wide

Tennessee is a long, narrow state — Shelby County in the west and Sullivan County in the east are roughly 500 miles apart and share almost no overlapping media coverage or community networks. When a nominee from one end of the state appears on the same ballot as one from the other, each campaign is effectively invisible to the other's base. That is not a problem to solve; it is the structure of the contest.

What it means practically: the relevant question for any campaign is not "how do we reach all of Tennessee" but "how completely do we activate the network that already knows this player." A school in Pulaski — where Xavier Randolph won — draws voters from Giles County and the communities whose teams it plays. That is a smaller circle than Knoxville or Nashville in absolute terms, but it is highly connected: the same people follow the same school across football, basketball, and baseball. If that circle is reached fully and early in the week, it competes with programs drawing on a city's worth of casual followers who may or may not vote even once.

The weekly cadence and Sunday deadline compress the window. A ballot that opens Sunday or Monday and closes the following Sunday gives a campaign roughly six days — but the realistic activation period is Friday through Sunday, when the game is fresh and people are still talking about it. Reaching the core network in those first 48 hours, then sustaining through Sunday afternoon, is the actual task. For campaigns that need volume beyond what an organic network can produce in that window, structured vote-support campaigns are built for exactly this kind of uncapped, time-limited poll.

For how recurring fan polls work across a full week, the how-to guide covers the weekly cadence in detail. More Tennessee contests are catalogued at /usa/tennessee/, and the full national directory is at /usa/.