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

McMiller's win in a loss — and what it reveals about this ballot

Cadarius McMiller of Tyler ran for 202 yards on 14 carries and scored three touchdowns in a playoff game his team lost 50-43. Cedar Park won that night. McMiller won the East Texas Player of the Week anyway.

That result tells you something specific about how this poll operates. SI's editorial staff nominated on individual production — 202 yards and three scores in a shootout is a nominating performance regardless of outcome — and the voters who saw those numbers responded to the game, not the final score. A family rallying around a player in a losing effort can move votes just as hard as a celebrating fan base from the winning sideline, sometimes harder. The nomination itself confirmed the game mattered; the vote confirmed the community agreed.

No percentage was published for that week — only McMiller's name and stat line appeared in the SI write-up. That absence is itself a data point: unlike the Dallas / North Texas regional poll, where a 54.77% majority was on record, the East Texas ballot does not routinely publish share totals. Campaigns here are running without a public benchmark for what a winning margin looks like.

The December 2 field — and the Kaegan Ash number that doesn't fit a weekly poll

The week McMiller won, four other players were on the ballot. Read the list with the county context:

Five schools, five counties, none of them Tyler. McMiller won from outside the ballot's geographic center that week — a reminder that the pool is genuinely regional, not anchored to any single school or town.

The detail that sits apart from everything else on that ballot: Kaegan Ash of Mt. Enterprise had scored 476 points in the 2025 season — a national single-season high school football scoring record, surpassing 453 points set in 1988. He was on a weekly regional fan-vote ballot the same week as four other players with no season-aggregate claim to that kind of recognition. The poll's weekly logic doesn't care about cumulative totals; Ash was judged on what he did in that specific game against that specific opponent. A player who breaks a 37-year national record can still finish second in a fan vote on a given Monday.

Newton County's Kendray Porter Jr also bears watching in future ballots. Newton's Eagles are one of the most decorated small-school programmes in Texas history — multiple state championships, a community where high school football is not background noise. When Newton has a player nominated, the county turns out.

Monday is the game — how East Texas campaigns actually work

The structural fact that shapes every East Texas campaign is the deadline: Monday 11:59 p.m. Pacific. The statewide SI Texas offensive and defensive polls are already closed by Sunday night. The East Texas regional ballot is not. That gap is not a quirk — it is the entire strategic window.

Getting a player onto the ballot starts before the poll even opens. Bob Lundeberg (bob.lundeberg@gmail.com) is the listed nomination contact; a submission with the full stat line, school, position, opponent, and game date that arrives Saturday night or Sunday morning gives the editors what they need before the field is set. A 200-yard game that nobody flags can be passed over for one that did get flagged.

Once the ballot is live, the geography of East Texas changes the calculus compared to a DFW regional campaign. The Tyler-Longview-Nacogdoches corridor is not a metro of millions — it is a collection of county seats and small towns where the high school is still the center of civic life on Friday nights. Newton County has roughly 14,000 residents. San Augustine County fewer than 9,000. When a player from one of those counties makes the ballot, the community that can reach every relevant adult in a single afternoon of Facebook posts is smaller, but it is also more completely connected. A single shared post on a local community page in Newton County will reach a higher fraction of available voters than the same post on a suburban Dallas page reaches in its larger, more diffuse audience.

That concentration is the structural advantage smaller East Texas communities carry into this poll — and why Longview or Tyler, with larger populations, do not automatically win every week. Reach percentage matters as much as absolute head count. For campaigns looking to close a gap before the Monday night deadline, vote-support options exist for open, unlimited fan polls of this type.