Dallas / North Texas High School Football Player of the Week: How Voting Works & How to Win

What Anagnostis's 54.77% actually tells you

Start with the last result on record. George Anagnostis of Dallas First Baptist won the Dallas / North Texas Player of the Week with 54.77% of the vote — and the number matters as much as the name. In a fan poll with six or more nominees, one candidate clearing half the vote is not the norm; most weeks the field splits and the winner takes a plurality in the thirties or forties. A 54.77% majority means one school's supporters consolidated while the rest divided.

The game behind it was a two-way performance against Temple CTCS: 201 rushing yards and a touchdown, 63 passing yards and a second score, and 22 tackles on defense. SI's regional ballots lean offensive, so a player who was also the leading tackler drawing the nod is itself a signal — the editors will reward an all-phase game, and voters rally to one when they see it.

That is the lesson worth carrying into any week here: this ballot rewards concentration. A nominee whose community moves together pulls clear; a nominee who splits attention with two equally backed rivals does not. Everything below is downstream of that.

The Monday deadline, and why it changes the math

The single most important thing to know about this poll is when it ends. High School on SI closes its statewide Texas polls — Offensive and Defensive Player of the Week — on Sunday at 11:59 p.m. Pacific. It closes the four regional ballots, Dallas / North Texas among them, a full day later, on Monday. That gap is not trivia; it is the strategic difference.

By Sunday night the statewide races are decided and most casual voters have moved on. The Dallas ballot is still open. The supporters who keep going through Monday — the team group chat that nudges everyone one more time over lunch, the booster page that posts again after work — are voting into a field that has largely gone quiet. The extra day belongs to whoever treats Monday as the contest rather than an afterthought.

The other difference is the field itself. On the statewide ballot a DFW star competes against Houston, East Texas, and South Texas at the same time. On the regional ballot the comparison set is local — which usually means more voters personally know the nominees, and raw turnout per name runs higher.

Quarterfinal week: six schools, four tiers

The December 9, 2025 ballot is a clean look at how varied the field gets. It fell on quarterfinal week, so every nominee's team was still alive deep in the playoffs:

Read the schools, not just the names. Celina, Gunter, Grandview, and Brock are smaller-classification programs from Collin, Grayson, Johnson, and Parker counties; South Oak Cliff is a decorated Dallas ISD program in a larger conference; Fort Worth All Saints plays under TAPPS, outside UIL entirely. Four tiers of Texas football — small-town public, big-city public, and private — on one six-name list.

That mix is the purpose of a fan vote, not a flaw in it. On the field a Class 2A town program and a 6A metro school never meet. On the ballot they do, and enrollment stops deciding anything. A town of a few thousand that turns out in full can out-vote a metro school many times its size that turns out at ten percent. The December 9 field — four small or private schools against a Dallas ISD name — is that contest in miniature.

The DFW map: who turns out, and how

Dallas-Fort Worth holds some of the most-watched high school football in the country, and the programs that surface on these ballots draw on very different kinds of support. Knowing which is which is most of the strategy.

The suburban 6A powers — Duncanville, Southlake Carroll, DeSoto, Lone Star in Frisco — carry the largest absolute fan bases: thousands of current families, alumni, and locals. The trade-off is that wide networks are slower to move together. A poll link has to travel through many loosely connected groups before it converts into votes, and that takes time the Monday deadline does not always give.

Dallas ISD programs like South Oak Cliff sit in a different category — a deep, identity-driven community where the school is a neighborhood institution and turnout spikes hard when the city's attention is on it. The small-town programs — Celina, Gunter, Brock — are the most centralized of all. A program in a town of a few thousand can route a link through what is effectively one connected community in an afternoon. Smaller in absolute terms, denser and faster in practice.

None of this is hypothetical for these ballots. It is why a small school can win a week a 6A school is also nominated, and why a winning margin says more about which community organized than which one has the most people. A campaign that knows its own network type — wide and slow, or small and fast — plans its Monday around it.

Running a real campaign before Monday night

Two things decide a Dallas / North Texas week: getting your player onto the ballot, and moving real people to it before the Monday close.

Getting on starts earlier than most people expect. SI's editors build the field from the weekend's results, and nominations go to Bob Lundeberg at [email protected]. A submission that arrives by Saturday night or Sunday morning — player, school, position, the full stat line, the opponent and score — gives the editors what they need before the ballot is set. A great game that nobody flags can be missed.

Once the ballot is live, the work is reach, not repetition. The poll is uncapped, so the instinct is to grind votes from one phone — but a few devices voting endlessly move the number far less than a few hundred people each voting through Monday. The job is to widen the circle: every player texting their own friend group, the booster page posting Sunday and again Monday, the alumni chain getting one more reminder before the night deadline. Because the ballot is open and settled entirely by turnout, the contest really is just how many real supporters you reach in time — which is why structured vote-support campaigns exist for weekly polls like this.

For how recurring fan votes work in general, the how-to guide walks through the weekly cadence; more Texas contests are collected at /usa/texas/, and the national directory lives at /usa/.