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

The thing a voter arriving here almost always gets wrong

Iowa's statewide weekly fan poll is not a football-exclusive ballot. That distinction matters the moment you click through. High School on SI runs one "Athlete of the Week" poll covering all fall sports on a single list — football nominees share it with volleyball players, cross-country runners, whoever else had a standout week. A voter who finds the right article may still scroll past a football nominee they recognize because the volleyball entries sit higher on the list that week.

The practical upside, and it is the one thing that changes how a campaign thinks about this ballot: a football nominee does not need to out-poll every athlete on the list, only the other football nominees. The football recognition goes to the football nominee with the highest total. Five volleyball nominees and six football nominees on the same list? A football candidate who beats the other five wins the football distinction regardless of where the volleyball entries rank or how many votes the top overall vote-getter accumulated across the whole multi-sport field.

This is Iowa's structural difference from every other SI regional poll in the country. The Dallas / North Texas ballot is football-only. Texas's statewide offensive and defensive polls are football-only. Iowa's is not. And that one fact changes how you read the field, plan a push, and interpret the results.

What Matson's 64.71% reveals about how Iowa votes

The clearest number in the Iowa public record: Coen Matson of Humboldt, a Class 3A quarterback, won 64.71% of the fan vote in a seven-nominee field for the 2024 overall Iowa Football Player of the Year. Unusual. In most multi-nominee fan polls, the field splits and the winner takes a plurality somewhere in the thirties or forties. A 64.71% majority in a seven-person field requires one community to consolidate tightly while six others divide — and that is exactly what happened in north-central Iowa last December.

Humboldt is a city of roughly 4,500 in the North Central Conference. Not the largest school on any ballot it appears on. But geographic density is the thing that matters here, not enrollment. A compact community can route a poll link through its entire network in an afternoon, reaching everyone who cares about the program with a single shared URL. Matson's season gave that community an unambiguous reason to move together — 2,616 passing yards at 64% completion, 28 touchdowns, 332 rushing yards, 5 rushing scores, plus the IFCA Class 3A Player of the Year. The stat line plus the density produced 64.71%.

Confirmed weekly winners tell the same story at smaller scale. Dain Sprague of Calamus-Wheatland won before the October 12 ballot; Addison Latta of Waukee Northwest won before October 19. Two very different programs — small-town north Iowa versus Des Moines suburban — but both required their school's network to activate before Sunday night closed the window.

Iowa's class landscape and what it means on the ballot

Iowa's IHSAA structure runs seven classifications: 5A (the 36 largest schools by enrollment), then 4A, 3A, 2A, 1A, Class A, and 8-Player for the smallest programs. All seven hold their championship games at the UNI-Dome in Cedar Falls on the same weekend in late November.

That single-venue championship weekend produces the largest football nominee fields of the season. The November 23–30, 2025 ballot carried 14 football nominees. Fourteen. It included Ian Middleton of Dowling Catholic (34 carries, 206 yards) and Ryan Bobo (2.5 sacks, 3 TFL, forced fumble, fumble recovery in one game) from the West Des Moines 5A-adjacent Catholic powerhouse, alongside Tate Foertsch of Bishop Garrigan (288 total yards, 3 TDs) from a Class A school in Belmond with roughly 200 students. Remsen St. Mary's, the 8-Player program that won its third title in five seasons in 2024, appeared in the overall POY umbrella ballot that same cycle — one 8-player program from a town that could fit inside a Waukee Northwest homeroom, on the same list as 5A nominees.

The division gap that determines playoff brackets disappears on a fan ballot. A Class A program whose community turns out in full can out-vote a 5A program whose community turns out at ten percent. Championship week — when families who drove to Cedar Falls and alumni who streamed the game are still energized — is the week that dynamic shows most clearly.

On a fan ballot, that column labeled "Scale" stops mattering. What matters is how many people in a school's orbit click a link before 11:59 Sunday night.

Running a campaign before Sunday closes in Iowa

Sunday evening is the only deadline that matters here. Iowa's ballot closes at 11:59 p.m. Pacific on Sunday — earlier than the Dallas / North Texas regional poll (Monday), the same day as Texas's statewide ballots. The window opens Saturday night when SI typically posts the new article, and it runs through Sunday afternoon and evening. That is your full campaign. No Monday lifeline.

Because the ballot lives inside a new article URL each week, sharing the exact link is not optional — it is the whole job. A supporter who searches for "Iowa athlete of the week vote" and lands on last week's article is voting into a closed ballot. Every group chat, booster page post, and alumni thread should carry the current article link with the date range visible. The article title always names the week (e.g., "10-26-2025"), which makes it easy to confirm you have the right one at a glance.

Iowa's geography shapes which school networks actually move these votes. The CIML suburban programs around Des Moines — Southeast Polk, Ankeny, Waukee Northwest — have the largest raw fan bases in the state, but wide networks move slowly. A shared link has to travel through many loosely connected groups before it converts into votes, and Sunday does not always leave enough time. A school like Humboldt or Grundy Center or Saint Ansgar draws from a compact community where a single text chain reaches nearly everyone who follows the program. Smaller in absolute numbers, but faster and more concentrated in practice — which is why a 3A school from north-central Iowa beat the Des Moines suburbs 64.71% to nothing on the POY ballot.

For supporters who want to extend their reach beyond what one school network can deliver before Sunday night, vote-support campaigns work on uncapped polls like this one. The Iowa fan-vote directory also lists other statewide polls running through the fall and winter.