Dave Campbell's Texas Football Quarterback of the Year: How Voting Works & How to Win

One publication has tracked this sport longer than almost anyone

Texas high school football does not lack for weekly polls. Nearly every metro market runs one — a TV station's Friday night vote, a newspaper's athlete of the week ballot, a regional fan poll tied to one city or one conference. Dave Campbell's Texas Football sits above that layer entirely. It is the statewide publication that has followed the sport continuously for decades, the outlet Texans reach for when they want to know who is actually good this year, not just who won last Friday in one zip code.

The Quarterback of the Year award reflects that scope. It does not open as a blank nomination form in December. It is built from an entire season's worth of QB of the Week winners, selected weekly across every UIL classification as the regular season plays out. By the time a finalist pool exists, each name in it has already survived one round of statewide editorial scrutiny. Six finalists were confirmed for the 2026 award on January 27, drawn from that season-long feeder.

That structure changes what a supporter is actually campaigning for. A regional TV poll asks fans to pick a favorite from a handful of local names in a single week. This ballot asks Texans to weigh in on which quarterback had the best season, statewide, among a small group that already earned its way there. Two very different kinds of vote, even though both end in a click.

Six finalists, one season, every UIL classification in play

The weekly QB of the Week program is the actual mechanism worth understanding, because it is what separates this award from a straightforward popularity contest. Nominees come from 6A programs with enrollments in the thousands and from the smallest UIL divisions running six-man or 1A football in West Texas towns most of the state has never heard of. A quarterback wins a given week's nod on performance, not on school size.

That means the six finalists named January 27 did not necessarily play each other, share a district, or even compete in the same classification. One finalist's case might rest on a single explosive week against a ranked district rival. Another's might be a full season of consistent production that stacked multiple weekly nods across a deep playoff run. The finalist pool is not sorted by division; it is sorted by who Dave Campbell's editorial team decided had the strongest case, full stop.

For readers comparing this to SI's weekly statewide offensive poll, the difference is cadence and scope. SI runs a Sunday-close weekly ballot all season. Dave Campbell's runs weekly QB of the Week picks as a feeder, then compresses everything into a single annual vote among a small finalist field once the season ends.

How the February vote actually plays out

Once texasfootball.com opens the public ballot on the finalist field, the mechanic is straightforward: real turnout, sustained across a window that runs weeks rather than hours, deciding a statewide award. That is a different rhythm than the Sunday-only sprint some Texas prep polls run. A finalist's support base has time to organize, not just react.

The window closes in February each season. Because the site sets the exact date and it is not fixed by rule year over year, checking texasfootball.com directly beats assuming last year's calendar repeats. A supporter who waits until the final days to start mobilizing loses the advantage a multi-week window is supposed to offer.

Nothing about this vote touches UIL. Classification, playoff seeding, and state championships run on UIL's own separate track, unaffected by who wins a magazine's readers' vote. What is at stake here is recognition — a statewide, publication-backed title that a quarterback and their program get to carry into the next season, decided by the people who watched.

Building real support for a finalist

A finalist already cleared one bar: a QB of the Week win sometime during the season, chosen from a statewide field. Getting from finalist to winner is a different problem, and it runs through the same networks that make Texas high school football what it is. Booster clubs. Alumni chains that stretch well outside the county the school sits in. Youth football feeder programs whose parents already know the varsity roster by name. A district rivalry that gives an entire community a reason to check the ballot daily.

The smallest-classification finalist, if one makes the field, has a structural advantage worth naming honestly: a tight community where the whole town already knows the story, versus a large 6A program where support is real but more diffuse across a bigger, less centralized fan base. Neither wins automatically. What decides it is which community actually shows up, day after day, for the length of the window.

For campaigns that want to extend organic reach across that multi-week window, sports fan-poll vote support is built for exactly this kind of open, public-turnout ballot — read texasfootball.com's current rules first, since a statewide publication can adjust its terms between award cycles. Broader mechanics for this style of open voting are covered in the online vote-buying guide and the fan poll voting guide.

This award sits inside a wider slate of Texas football recognition. The statewide Player of the Year tracking, the weekly SI offensive poll, and the four regional Dallas, Houston, East Texas, and San Antonio ballots all run alongside this one, each with a different scope and clock. The full Texas slate sits at the Texas contest hub, part of the USA contest directory.