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

The thing nobody tells you about finding this poll

Here is the most useful thing to know before you do anything else: the West Texas Player of the Week has no permanent landing page. It is not on a hub. It is not at a fixed URL. Each week SI publishes a new dated article on si.com/high-school/texas, and the poll lives inside that article. When the week is over, that article stays online — and the old ballot still loads — but voting is closed. A fan who finds last week's article and casts votes there has accomplished nothing.

That friction is unusual. Other regional polls in this family — Dallas, Houston, San Antonio, East Texas — have the same article-embedded structure, but they run consistently enough that the search results surface them quickly. The West Texas series is less predictable. Only Week 4 (Sept 23, 2025) is confirmed with a fetched article and full nominee list. Whether the series ran in Weeks 1-3 or 5 onward is not on public record. So the first move for any campaign is confirming the ballot exists for the current week before anything else.

The confirmed Week 4 article URL pattern: si.com/high-school/texas/vote-who-should-be-west-texas-high-school-football-player-of-the-week-for-week-4-09-23-2025-01k5wf9jphm4. Searching "West Texas high school football player of the week" on SI's site or Google with the current date will surface the live article if one was published. When in doubt — check Tuesday or Wednesday of game week, not the day of.

What the Week 4 ballot actually looked like

The confirmed Week 4 field shows what West Texas football looks like on one ballot: fifteen nominees spread across a geography that runs roughly 450 miles from El Paso in the southwest to Canyon and Amarillo in the Panhandle, east to Midland and south to San Angelo. No two schools on that list draw from overlapping fan bases.

The three nominees with the most detailed confirmed stats:

Frenship put two players on the same ballot in the same week — and that matters. Campbell's 57-56 thriller against Lubbock-Cooper produced a quarterback stat line; Ferris, his receiver in that same game, had a separate case on his own. When two teammates share a field, the school's supporters divide — a school that consolidates behind one name has an advantage over a school that splits its own vote between two.

Also on that ballot: nominees from Wall, Ropesville Ropes, Henrietta, and Paducah. Small towns that, enrollment-wise, have no business being on the same list as Frenship or Midland Legacy. But the fan vote does not check enrollment. Paducah is a town of fewer than 3,000 people in Cottle County. Wall Hawks fans pack their own community tight. Neither needs to out-vote a bigger school citywide — they just need to turn out a higher share of what they have.

No public winner of Week 4 is confirmed. SI did not publish the final percentages or vote totals in a retrievable record.

The Monday close, and what West Texas geography means for it

The Monday deadline is worth understanding precisely. The statewide Texas offensive and defensive polls — the ones that run every week without exception — close Sunday at 11:59 p.m. Pacific. The West Texas regional closes Monday at 11:59 p.m. Pacific. That is the same Monday close the Dallas regional uses, and it is not an accident. SI runs its regional Texas polls a day later than its statewide ones.

For West Texas, that extra day matters differently than it does in Dallas-Fort Worth. DFW is a single metro. West Texas is five separate cities that happen to be in the same region. El Paso fans mobilizing on Monday morning are doing so independently of what Lubbock fans are doing, which is independent of Amarillo, Midland, and San Angelo. There is no shared news cycle or social media environment that connects them. Each city is its own campaign.

The Monday window, from morning to 11:59 p.m. Pacific (which is 12:59 a.m. Central time Tuesday), is where the race settles. A fan group that posts the ballot link Sunday evening and then again Monday afternoon is working both sides of the window. A group that posted only Friday and Saturday is done competing.

Running a real campaign from El Paso, Lubbock, or Wall

The practical reality of this poll is that its geographic sprawl makes it five contests running in parallel. There is no West Texas fan community in the way DFW has a shared media market. El Paso is a border city of 800,000 on Mountain Time, closer to Arizona than to the rest of Texas culturally and geographically. Lubbock is a college town whose football culture runs through Texas Tech. Amarillo, Midland, and the Panhandle small towns each have their own self-contained networks.

What that means in practice: a school's campaign is almost entirely internal. The El Paso Franklin boosters are not competing for the same voters as the Wall community in Tom Green County. Both are competing for the same finish line, but through entirely separate fan pools. So the work is purely depth-of-own-community: how many players in your program share the link; how active the booster page is Monday versus Sunday; whether the coaches mention it.

Nominations go to SI's Texas editorial team — Bob Lundeberg at [email protected] is the listed contact for the Texas regional polls. A West Texas game result that deserves a nomination needs to land Saturday night or Sunday morning with the full stat line, the opponent, and the score. Editors build the field from what they receive; a great game nobody flags can be missed.

Because the ballot is unlimited and settled by turnout alone, reach beats repetition. A campaign that adds 200 real voters beats one device cycling through 1,000 times. When a race is this compressed into a week and a geography this spread, structured vote-support campaigns built for open, uncapped polls like this one exist for exactly that reason.

For how the weekly fan-vote cadence works in general, the how-to guide covers the mechanics. More Texas contests are at /usa/texas/, and the full national directory is at /usa/.