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

The number that reframes the whole poll

Hunter Mustin of Creswell won the Oregon Football Athlete of the Week on 10/28/2024 with 80.16% of the vote. Sawyer Quinton of Prairie City/Burnt River won the following week — Thanksgiving, state-championship weekend — with 79.45%. The week before Mustin, Tyler Hart-McNally of West Albany took 75.72%. Three consecutive weeks above 75%, from three programs that have nothing in common except that their communities voted as a single unit.

That is the structural fact most voters miss when they first encounter this poll: it has 25 to 36 nominees per week. The 12/2/2024 ballot had 26 names; the 10/7/2024 ballot had 36. In a field that wide, a winning percentage in the 70s does not require an overwhelming vote total — it requires that one community moves together while everyone else splits. Mustin, Quinton, and Hart-McNally all won the same way: their towns organized, and the rest of the field fragmented.

Compare that to weeks where the field consolidates around a major program. Cole Dixon won the 12/9/2024 poll for West Linn with 62.20% — lower than the small-school runs, and West Linn is the 6A Columbia Cup champion. Four West Linn players were on the 12/2/2024 ballot the week before, and South Medford's Michael Duclos won that one with 74.94% while West Linn split its vote four ways. The data consistently shows: a school that concentrates on one nominee beats a school with a larger fan base that divides it.

What the 12/2/2024 ballot reveals about classification and outcome

The week of December 2, 2024 is the clearest single snapshot of how Oregon's poll works, because it happened to fall during state championship weekend — meaning virtually every nominee's team was still alive.

The classification spread matters here for a reason that goes beyond trivia. Burns won the 3A state title in 2024 as an 11-2 team and the lowest seed to win since OSAA seeded those brackets. Adrian won the 1A 8-man championship. Powers won 1A 6-man. All three programs had nominees on the same ballot as the 6A Columbia Cup champion's entire backfield. None of them won that week — but they were there, and in weeks where a small school's community shows up fully, they do win.

The lesson from the classification table is not which tier is strongest. It is that South Medford's Duclos took nearly three quarters of the vote not by having the biggest fan base in the field — West Linn is the 6A champion — but because West Linn nominated four players and split its own vote, while South Medford ran one.

Dan Brood's poll and the nomination window you actually control

Dan Brood curates the Oregon Football Athlete of the Week and is the one person who determines whether your player appears on the ballot. He takes nominations at danbrood91@gmail.com and monitors @sbliveor on Twitter and Instagram. The window matters: Brood compiles nominees from the weekend's game results, so a submission that arrives Saturday night or Sunday morning — with the player's name, school, position, the complete stat line, and the opponent and final score — reaches him before the field is set. A great performance nobody flags can simply not appear.

Once a player is on the ballot, the nomination work is done and the vote work begins. The poll closes Sunday at 11:59 p.m. Pacific, which means the effective window runs from the ballot's posting (often mid-week after Monday's winner announcement) through Sunday night. The Sunday afternoon and evening hours carry disproportionate weight — casual supporters who have been meaning to vote all week often do it then, which is also when organized campaigns make their final push.

Because the ballot is open, uncapped for manual votes, and settled entirely by turnout across a 25-to-36-name field, the competitive advantage goes to whichever community reaches the most real voters before 11:59 p.m. Sunday. That is why structured vote-support campaigns are used in weekly polls exactly like this one — the mechanics reward reach, not persistence from a single device. For how the weekly fan-vote cycle works in practice, the how-to guide covers the full cadence. Other Oregon contests are at /usa/oregon/, and the national directory is at /usa/.