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

The thing most supporters get wrong before they vote

There is no universal close time for the Alabama football poll. That is the detail that bites campaigns that assume it works like the Dallas / North Texas ballot — which closes every week on Monday at 11:59 p.m. Pacific, no exceptions. SBLive Alabama sets the deadline on each week's post individually. You cannot schedule a Monday-night push and trust it. You have to open that week's article, find the close language, and plan around it.

The second thing worth knowing upfront: no raw vote totals are published. The Dallas ballot tells you the winner's exact percentage after the fact — George Anagnostis of Dallas First Baptist took 54.77% in the most recent confirmed week, which told his community exactly how concentrated their vote effort was. Alabama does not give you that number. You are running a campaign without a scoreboard, which means the only metric available to you is reach — how many real people you got to the post before voting closed.

Those two facts — variable deadline, no published totals — are the structural difference between this poll and its SI siblings in bigger markets. Neither makes it impossible to run a serious campaign. They do change the tactics.

What the November 2025 ballot tells us

Landyn Smith of St. Clair County and Frank Hayes of Colbert County are the confirmed nominees from the November 2025 High School on SI / SBLive Alabama football poll. Both matter not just as names but as geography.

St. Clair County sits east of Birmingham. The Bulldogs draw from a district that is large by rural Alabama standards but nowhere near the enrollment base of a Hoover or Thompson. Colbert County is further away still — northwest Alabama, Tennessee Valley, a program that produces occasional standouts but rarely dominates statewide football coverage.

Two rural-district nominees on a statewide ballot. That is what the November 2025 field tells you about scope: SBLive Alabama does not limit the ballot to the 7A metro programs. A 4A school in a county of 90,000 people competes for the same online attention as a Hoover Buccaneer on a 6A playoff run. Enrollment does not gate the vote. Organized turnout does.

The fact that those two names are the only confirmed nominees from public records here is itself useful data. It is not that only two players were nominated. It is that the weekly posts are the only archive — there is no centralized results database. The history lives in individual articles on the Alabama hub, and not every one of them surfaces easily in search.

AHSAA classifications: 7A at the top, 1A at the bottom, one ballot for all of them

Alabama runs seven classifications — 1A through 7A — across roughly 350 programs. The largest division, 7A, includes schools like Hoover, Thompson, Hewitt-Trussville, and Clay-Chalkville: metro Birmingham programs with enrollments above 2,000, national rankings, and fan bases that span multiple counties. The smallest, 1A, includes programs with fewer than 100 students playing eight- or eleven-man ball in counties most out-of-state readers have never heard of.

One ballot covers all of them.

That is the fan-vote mechanic's defining characteristic, and it cuts both ways. A 7A powerhouse brings a theoretically larger absolute audience, but that audience is spread across a large metro area where not everyone is paying close attention to a midweek online poll. A 2A school in a county of 25,000 people, where the football team is genuinely the center of community life from August through November, can put most of its supporters on one link in an afternoon if the organization is there. The November 2025 ballot — St. Clair County and Colbert County alongside the larger programs — is that dynamic in practice.

Classification also shifts. The AHSAA has published 2024–2026 and 2026–2028 alignment cycles, so a school's class label can change. Check current AHSAA classification before using class designations in public posts about a nominee.

Running the campaign when there is no fixed deadline

Every effective campaign for this poll starts with one step that feels administrative but is actually the whole game: open the current post and copy the close language exactly as written. Not "voting closes Monday" — that is the Dallas rule. Whatever SBLive Alabama says on that week's page is the deadline, and your close-day message should quote it directly.

Launch day is the direct URL through team parent chats and the school athletic account — not si.com/high-school/alabama generically, but the specific dated post. St. Clair County and Colbert County both have active county-level sports pages that cover local nominees; those are your first call. Then a mid-window reminder for people who saw the post and did not click. Then, on close day, the deadline quoted verbatim from the post itself — not a guess.

Alabama alumni who have moved to Huntsville, Birmingham, or Tuscaloosa are worth a direct reach. They may not follow the team daily, but they will vote when a former teammate texts them the link personally. That is a different ask than a booster-page post, and it converts at a higher rate than anything broadcast.

For the broader mechanics of how recurring weekly fan votes work, the how-to guide covers the standard cadence. If your school runs other contest-style polls during the season, contest vote support covers those formats too. More Alabama contests are indexed at the Alabama contest hub, and the full national directory is at the USA contest index.