If you live in an area that is crazy about college football, you generally get attached to or at least very familiar in either a positive or negative way (depending on your allegiances) to those guys from local colleges or local high schools, and play a little more attention to them when they move on to play on Sundays.
Here in south Florida they give the NFL recaps in the paper and add to them by telling you how the players with local ties did (FSU, Miami, or from local high schools). Tebow, Aaron Hernandez, Wilfork, McGahee, Portis, Anquan Bolden, Reggie Wayne, Santonio Holmes (yuck), Frank Gore, Devin Hester, Santana Moss, etc.
Sometimes the slants are little crazy. Like when Fred Taylor wound up with the Pats and hardly played, the local sportcasters would tout the upcoming game featuring "the Dolphins vs. the Patriots and Pakokee's Fred Taylor"
though to be fair when I lived in New England you would hear the same thing. The Atlanta Braves pitcher Tom Glavine was never referred to by anything else in the Massachusetts media than "Billerica's Tommy Glavine"