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

The thing most Maryland voters don't know — this became two polls in 2025

The most practically useful fact about SI's Maryland football Player of the Week vote is structural, not statistical: it changed formats between 2024 and 2025. In 2024, one combined poll ran each week, putting offensive and defensive nominees on the same ballot. Beginning in the 2025 season, SI split them into two independent weekly votes — a separate offensive ballot and a separate defensive ballot, each with its own URL, its own nominee field, and its own vote count.

That matters for two reasons. First, a supporter searching for "Maryland football player of the week" and landing on the defensive poll when their player is on the offensive one has voted on the wrong ballot — and the Sunday close does not offer much time to recover. Second, a performance that would have competed against both quarterbacks and linebackers in 2024 now competes only against players at the same positional category, which changes what the field looks like in any given week.

The 2024 archive URL — "vote-maryland-high-school-football-player-of-the-week" — and the 2025 URLs — one for offensive, one for defensive — are different enough that bookmarks and old links do not carry over. Check the date and the "offensive" or "defensive" label in the article title before you vote.

What the confirmed winners actually show about this poll

Three offensive patterns emerge from the 2025 results on record. The first is that passing performances dominate nominations: Ben Raines (South River, 260 yards, 5 TDs), Amir Elder (Oxon Hill, 311 yards, 5 TDs), Ty Bussard (Severn School, multiple weeks), Colton Starlings (Queen Anne's County, 335 yards, 4 TDs), and Tyler Bell (Atholton, 258 yards, 3 TDs plus rushing) all made it on quarterback lines. Derek Toney's editorial lens for offensive nominations skews aerial.

The second is that private schools are genuinely in the mix. Ty Bussard of Severn School — which plays under MIAA, not MPSSAA — won at least twice in the 2025 season. A prep-school quarterback from the Baltimore private-school circuit competed on the same weekly ballot as public-school nominees from all six MPSSAA classes. The ballot does not ask what association a player's school belongs to.

The third is the exception that proves the first two: Abi Archibong of Fallston. A freshman running back with 25 carries, 301 yards, and five touchdowns in a playoff week earned a nomination alongside a field of senior quarterbacks each throwing for five scores. That is what a sufficiently large rushing line can do — it earns a spot even when the editorial tilt is toward the passing game.

A 335-yard, four-TD game (Starlings, Queen Anne's County) did not win on the Nov. 11 ballot. Neither did 25 carries and five touchdowns from Archibong. Both Raines and Elder threw for five scores each — the distinction was likely turnout, not the stat line. This poll is not decided by which performance was objectively better; it is decided by which school's community moved people to si.com by Sunday night.

The Maryland football landscape that arrives on one weekly ballot

Maryland's public programs run through six MPSSAA enrollment tiers. At the top sits Class 4A, where Quince Orchard in Gaithersburg built an 87-3 record from 2018 through the 2025 season and took seven total state titles. At the other end is Class 1A, where Patuxent won the 2025 championship 35-28 over Fort Hill — a program that had been reaching for a fifth consecutive 1A crown. In between: Linganore, a Class 3A school in Frederick County that went undefeated in 2025 for the first program's first perfect season since 2009; Huntingtown, a 2A program that claimed its first-ever state title 24-21 over Northern-Calvert; and Paul Laurence Dunbar in Baltimore, a 2A/1A program with 13 state titles and counting.

None of those classifications gate the weekly fan ballot. A Paul Laurence Dunbar nominee competes against a Quince Orchard nominee and a Severn School nominee on the same Sunday-closing poll. What the classification landscape actually explains is community structure: a school like Dunbar carries a Baltimore city identity and an alumni network rooted in one of the state's most football-serious communities. A school like Patuxent or Fort Hill draws from rural Southern and Western Maryland, where the program is the center of a smaller town's weekly social calendar during football season. Neither network is inherently larger than the other in fan-vote terms — the question is which one mobilizes faster on a given Sunday.

For a campaign built around a nominee from outside the top classes, that structure is the opportunity. A Fallston freshman earning a nomination is a smaller school's moment — and smaller schools often have more centralized communication chains. One well-timed post from the team's own accounts, forwarded through a tight booster network, reaches a higher percentage of the total community than the same effort from a 4A school's diffuse alumni base. See the broader Maryland contest landscape at /usa/maryland/ or the national directory at /usa/.

Running a Sunday campaign — what actually decides a Maryland week

Maryland's SI poll closes Sunday, not Monday. That single fact shapes everything about how a campaign runs here. The effective window is roughly 36 hours: from when the ballot posts Sunday morning (after Saturday night's games have been compiled by Derek Toney) until 11:59 p.m. Pacific Sunday night. There is no Monday to lean on. A booster group that waits until Monday morning has already lost.

The most common failure mode is front-loading. A wave of votes on Saturday evening — if the poll is already live — followed by silence through Sunday afternoon is a losing pattern, because the opposition's Sunday push goes unanswered. The decisive push is Sunday afternoon through evening, after fans are home from weekend activities and checking phones. Reminders at noon, at 3 p.m., and after dinner reach voters at the moments they are most likely to actually click through.

Because this is an uncapped ballot decided purely by turnout, the contest is reach, not repetition. Widening the circle — getting the player's own friend group involved, reaching the school's alumni association, putting the link in the parent chat before Sunday evening — produces more votes than any single supporter returning to the same device. For teams whose organic networks do not reach far enough before Sunday night, structured vote-support campaigns are built for exactly this kind of Sunday-deadline, open-ballot format. For context on how weekly fan polls work more broadly, the how-to guide covers the recurring cadence.