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

What 522 yards on one ballot tells you about this poll

Start with the sharpest confirmed data point. On September 29, 2025, Xander Edwards of Bolles appeared on the Northeast Florida ballot with a stat line most voters never see in a single week: 522 rushing yards, 8 touchdowns, on 39 carries. That line sat alongside 24 other nominees — one of the largest single-week fields in SI's Florida regional set. A ballot that large, with a performance that extreme at the top, tells you something specific about how this poll works.

A 25-nominee field changes the math compared to a five- or six-name ballot. Vote share spreads across more entries, which means the winner does not need an absolute majority — a well-organized community can take a plurality while the other 24 nominees split everything else. It also means a jaw-dropping stat line is not automatically decisive. Edwards's yards were visible in the ballot write-up, but whether his Bolles community converted that performance into votes is a separate question from whether the game itself was the best of the week.

That tension — raw performance versus organized turnout — is the defining feature of every weekly fan poll, and the Northeast Florida ballot with 25 nominees puts it in the sharpest possible relief. The rest of this page is built from that.

The September 29 ballot — six confirmed nominees in a 25-name field

The confirmed data covers six nominees from that week by name and stat line. Here is what they produced:

Look at what those six programs represent: Bolles and University Christian are private schools with geographically spread alumni. Mandarin and Bartram Trail are large public programs rooted in specific Jacksonville neighborhoods and St. Johns County. Baldwin is a smaller Duval County public school. Harvest Community is a smaller private program. All of them on one ballot, competing against nineteen other nominees who are confirmed by count but not by name in the current record.

In a field that wide, Stephen Screws and Andrew Posey both threw for 5 touchdowns in the same week and each came from a different school type. That matters for campaign strategy: a nominee is not automatically advantaged by having the best stat line if another nominee's community gets to the link first and votes in volume before Sunday's close.

Platform mechanics and Sunday deadline

The Northeast Florida poll lives inside an article on si.com/high-school/florida — not on a standalone ballot page. After each week's games, SI reporters post the new article with the embedded poll widget. The widget accepts votes immediately upon posting and closes Sunday at 11:59 p.m. Pacific — which is 2:59 a.m. Monday Eastern, so Sunday night in Jacksonville is effectively the hard cutoff.

The Sunday close is shorter than voters often expect. A nominee's family may assume "the week" means Monday or Tuesday, share a link Thursday, and discover on Sunday afternoon that the decisive window has nearly passed. The campaigns that hold on the Northeast Florida ballot are the ones that treat Sunday morning as the critical push, not Sunday as a day off.

Jacksonville's school networks and how they vote

Northeast Florida high school football pulls from a distinctly mixed landscape. Bolles is a Jacksonville private school with a strong academic reputation and alumni scattered well beyond Duval County — graduates who follow the football program from Tallahassee, Atlanta, and further. When Xander Edwards ran for 522 yards, the question for his campaign was whether that geographically dispersed alumni base could be reached digitally and converted into Sunday votes before the close.

Raines and Mandarin represent a different kind of network entirely — programs embedded in specific Jacksonville neighborhoods where the school is a community institution. A Knox Annis week at Mandarin activates a different fan structure than a Bolles week: more local, more concentrated in a specific zip code, faster to reach through neighborhood group chats and school-specific social pages. Bartram Trail draws from the growing St. Johns County suburbs south of Jacksonville, a large and relatively affluent community that has built a serious football program in recent years.

Then there is Baldwin — a smaller public school in western Duval — and Harvest Community, a small private program. Both produced 5-touchdown quarterbacks on the September 29 ballot. Stephen Screws threw for 445 yards, Andrew Posey for 253. Roughly equal production from programs with very different network sizes. The smaller the school's absolute fan base, the more precisely it has to organize: every family texted, every alum group pinged, the article link shared early enough for people to act on it before Sunday night arrives.

In a 25-nominee field, the practical question is which school can get its community to the article link before 11:59 p.m. Pacific on Sunday. That is shaped more by how centralized or dispersed the network is than by how large it is in absolute terms — which is why a well-organized small program can out-vote a larger school that treats Sunday as optional.

Running a real campaign in the Northeast Florida window

The Northeast Florida ballot opens with the SI article after each weekend's games and closes Sunday at 11:59 p.m. PT — giving Jacksonville-area campaigns roughly two to four days depending on when the article posts. In a week with 25 nominees, those days matter differently than in a six-name field: more nominees means vote splitting is the norm, which means a smaller but well-organized coalition can take a plurality while the rest divide.

The article link — not a screenshot, not a paraphrase — is what converts supporters into votes. The September 29 field is instructive: with six confirmed performers who all had statistically strong weeks, the winning campaign would be the one whose community moved earliest and pushed again on Sunday. Get the link into team family group chats and school booster pages as soon as the article is live. Plan a second push on Saturday. Send a focused Sunday reminder before the evening close — that Sunday afternoon window is when votes land in a tight field.

For campaigns where organic reach is not moving the numbers fast enough, vote-support campaigns exist for exactly this kind of weekly, open, uncapped competition. For more on how recurring fan polls work across Florida, the Florida contest guide covers other regional formats running simultaneously.