When I see the title "favorite player", I think of a player that someone has seen a number of times and was their favorite to watch. In most cases, I would think that a favorite player to watch would be a home town player, not necessarily the player that made it to the highest level in sports from the area or who was the most famouse. Although there are many great pro players from our area, how many have gone on to the Hall of Fame like Bubba Smith? The only problem is, I never saw Bubba Smith play so he was not my favorite player to watch.
With that in mind, I am from Nederland and watched almost every one of their games for the last 40 years. The two players that I really looked forward to seeing were Sean Yoder and Ryan Butler. Both were candidates for the Willie Ray Smith Award and Yoder won it. There are certainly many other great players that went on to loftier careers after they left high school football. They were just not my favorite players to watch since I never saw most of them unless they played Nederland and then only for one, maybe two games. For my enjoyment, those are two players that I looked forward to each week as being dominant on the field in many ways.