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

The question voters get wrong when they open this ballot

Most people who arrive at a Maryland high school defensive Player of the Week poll assume it works the same way as every other SI football poll in the country. The thing worth saying first is that it does not — not in 2025, anyway. Through the 2024 season, SI ran a single combined Maryland football POTW poll: offensive and defensive nominees on one list, one winner per week. Starting in 2025, the two polls separated. They have different article URLs, different nominee sets, and different winners each Sunday. If you search for the old combined slug and find a 2024 article, you are looking at a defunct format.

The practical confusion this creates: a family showing up to support their player on a "Maryland football Player of the Week" search may land on the offensive ballot, vote there for a few minutes, and never realize the defensive poll is a completely separate article. On a close week, that confusion costs votes that should have gone somewhere else.

The second thing worth saying is about the cap. The 2024 combined poll carried an explicit unlimited-voting notice, and the 2025 split format carries the same mechanics — no CAPTCHA, no per-session limit, and no documented restriction per person. The Sunday 11:59 p.m. PT close is the only hard wall.

What Cameron Stepp's game reveals about this ballot

The most recent confirmed winner going into the Nov. 25 poll was Cameron Stepp of C. Milton Wright in Harford County: 9 tackles and 5 sacks. Five sacks in a single game is a number that needs no interpretation. On a defensive ballot where most nominees post tackle totals in the 9-to-15 range, a five-sack game sits at a different altitude — it is the kind of line that travels by word of mouth before anyone has to run a campaign.

The Nov. 25 field that followed Stepp's win shows what the ballot looks like in a more typical week:

Two players from the same school — Old Mill's Pinkney and Loving-Adkins — appeared on the same ballot. That split matters: Old Mill's supporters have to decide which name to concentrate on, or they divide their effort and help neither. Meanwhile Paul Laurence Dunbar, with 13 state football championships in its history and a Baltimore City alumni network that activates hard on local recognition, put Holmes on a ballot in blowout conditions — 52-6 is the kind of final score that puts points on social media. The programs on any given week's list carry very different community structures behind them.

The Maryland classification gap, and why it does not decide the ballot

MPSSAA divides Maryland football into six tiers by enrollment — Class 4A at the top, Class 1A at the bottom, with combined brackets at 4A/3A and 2A/1A in between. On the field, those tiers keep Patuxent (1A champion in 2025) from ever playing Quince Orchard (four of the last six 4A titles, an 87-3 record since 2018). On the fan-vote ballot, those tiers are invisible.

The Sept. 15, 2025 defensive ballot makes the point: Gavin Jones of Northern-Calvert posted 5 sacks in a 40-0 win over McDonough alongside Donteze Branch of Paul Laurence Dunbar, one of the state's most storied programs. Northern-Calvert is a Class 3A school in Calvert County; Dunbar competes in a different classification entirely. Neither fact changes who wins the fan vote — turnout does. A county program that routes a link through one connected booster group over a weekend can clear a Baltimore City name that turns out at ten percent of its potential.

Patuxent winning the 1A championship in 2025 (35-28 over Fort Hill) and Linganore completing the first perfect season since 2009 in Class 3A are proof that the state's smaller-enrollment programs are not minor actors. They carry real community identity — and that identity converts in fan polls when the community mobilizes.

Running a real campaign before Sunday night

The Maryland defensive ballot closes Sunday at 11:59 p.m. PT. That close is a day earlier than the SI regional polls that run in Texas and some other states — there is no Monday buffer here. Saturday night, after the games are in, is when the campaign has to start.

The nomination comes first. SI Maryland's defensive poll is authored by Derek Toney, and the editorial team builds the field from the weekend's results. A performance that does not get flagged — a 5-sack game from a school not already in SI's regular coverage — can be missed. If your player had the kind of night that belongs on this ballot, the time to get that stat line in front of the SI Maryland desk is Saturday night or early Sunday morning, before the ballot is set.

Once the article is live, the work is reach. The poll is uncapped and runs all week, but the decisive hours on a Sunday-close ballot are Sunday afternoon into early evening — after the morning share and before the casual audience moves on to something else. Every player texting their own contacts is a multiplier; the booster page posting the link Sunday morning and again at midday extends that reach further. Because the ballot is settled entirely by turnout, vote-support campaigns built for weekly fan polls are calibrated for exactly this kind of Sunday-close window. The how-to guide walks through the weekly cadence that applies to Sunday-close ballots specifically.

More Maryland contests are catalogued at /usa/maryland/, and the full national directory lives at /usa/.