Manti Te’o and the strangest story of the year

Teo’s stock had dropped after the hoax was unveiled and the ensuing media coverage flipped the story of the linebacker’s charisma and leadership. In addition, Teo’s performance against Alabama in the BCS title game was lackluster. However, King doesn’t buy into all of that, saying Te’o showed throughout the season that he can be a playmaker at the NFL level.

As for another perspective, SB Nation’s Matthew Fairburn sees Te’o dropping a little further than the Bengals at No. 21, going six spots later to the Houston Texans in his most recent mock draft.

A Michigan Man such as Michigan athletic director Dave Brandon, former CEO of Domino’s Pizza, knows the value of preparation.

So prepared is the Michigan Man for whatever travails may arise along life’s paths, the Michigan Man is willing to adorn Himself in the shroud of the Michigan Woman, if the betterment of a fellow Michigan Man is the objective.

Tuisasosopo was apparently forthcoming, even as Dr. McGraw questioned what that means about his sexuality, as transcribed by Today News:

Te’o spent hours on the phone with the imaginary Lennay Kekua, and believed the person to be female. Tuiasosopo still insists that he was the voice of Kekua the whole time, and also was adamant in saying that Te’o did not know of hoax as it was happening.

And yet, despite Te’o and Ronaiah Tuiasosopo becoming national names and punchlines, despite Notre Dame stepping up for one of its best football players in a way it didn’t for a young woman who committed suicide after alleging sexual assault against a Golden Domer and a young man who died in the process of obtaining information for Notre Dame, despite the story’s course presenting a dozen opportunities to gape at the problems in sports (and mainstream) media in America, there are those who insist Manti Te’o doesn’t matter.

Did we just spend the last 12 days making jokes about a thing that “doesn’t matter?” (We do seem to do that a lot.) Are we deeply invested in the outcome of a story that makes us look bad for caring? (We do this a lot, too.) Does the interest in feeding the many, many people who would like to know more about Te’o and how this all happened combined with an apparent lack of interest in ascertaining whether Te’o’s phantom girlfriend ever existed when he was telling us all that she did tell us something about the media? (Yes, yes, a thousand times yes.)

We out here live-tweeting Katie Couric, y’all. It’s not right.

For the complete, blow-by-blow timeline of the great Te’o flimflam, I cannot recommend anything above our own Manti Te’o hoax StoryStream, which now has 52 freaking updates in it, from the day the news broke through this morning. I’m comfortable assuming that’s the most updates ever entered into a SB Nation StoryStream about a non-real person, unless you count the ones on Roger Goodell.

It turns out the woman Manti Te’o spoke to on the phone reportedly was actually a woman, throwing another twist into the complicated story that everybody would prefer would stop having twists thrown into it.

Thursday, the earth-shattering news broke that the woman Te’o spent 500 hours of phone time talking to was former high school football player turned YouTube musician Ronaiah Tuiasosopo, whose lawyer admitted that his client had been behind the hoax and had talked in a female voice to trick the Notre Dame linebacker. Then, Te’o released audio of voicemails from the supposed Lennay Kekua, and the voice sounded like a woman, and we got mad we had to keep writing about this.

O’Meara claims that she received a Facebook message from Tuiasosopo out of the blue, where he asked if she could take a picture for his cousin that had just been in a car accident because the cousin thought she was pretty. She complied with his request, and the picture she took was used as part of the hoax.

Te’o, who spoke with ESPN’s Jeremy Schaap over the weekend, maintains that he had no idea that he was being scammed until recently, and had no part in the execution of the hoax.

Carrier spoke with Te’o recently as he prepares for the NFL combine in Florida. He says that Te’o is trying to get past the ordeal and is growing weary from the stress and attention:

Te’o isn’t likely to leave the spotlight any time soon. He is scheduled to conduct an interview alongside his parents with Katie Couric that will be shown on Thursday.

An unnamed source told ESPN that it was actually her who took the photographs that were sent to Te’o. The source said that she received a message from “U’ilani Rae Kekua,” Lennay Kekua’s fake sister. There were requests for photos of the Notre Dame team hotel, the fountains outside and the elevators, which struck the source as odd. The source added that she was confident U’ilani was still in California at the time. Those photos later were tweeted out from the account that supposedly belonged to Lennay Kekua.

Te’o has yet to speak in an on-camera interview about the hoax situation, but he is set to meet with ABC News’ Katie Couric on Thursday. He already has spoken off-camera to ESPN’s Jeremy Schaap.

Also, Baylor is a university with a religious affiliation, which is very interesting.

Nicknamed “Fast Eddie” by head coach Art Briles (because he is fast and named Eddie, not because he’s ever been known to have conned anyone or to have embellished a truth), Lackey finished second on his team in tackles with 104, led in tackles for loss with 10.5 (five more than a recent Heisman Trophy finalist linebacker, which is very interesting) and tied for second in sacks with four. Nationally, his four interceptions rank him tops among all returning linebackers heading into next season. Interceptions are considered a critical statistic for college linebackers, as of like November 2012.

On Saturday, Notre Dame officials defended the way they handled the Manti Te’o girlfriend hoax. In a discussion with the South Bend Tribune, they said they felt they’d dealt with the situation in the best way they could.

“Hindsight is 20-20,” university spokesman Dennis Brown said. “Like most everybody else, except perhaps the makers of the documentary ‘Catfish’ and fans of that form, we were utterly stunned to hear the news on the first day and had difficult time getting our arms around it.”

Although Notre Dame athletic director Jack Swarbrick told reporters during a press conference on Wednesday that the university was informed about a potential hoax regarding the death of “Lennay Kekua” in late December, a video was posted on the Notre Dame athletics YouTube channel on Jan. 9 promoting a fundraiser for leukemia in the name of Kekua, according to Charles Wilson the Associated Press.

The fundraiser was started by Dan Tudesco, a graduate of Notre Dame, who told his story to SB Nation last week after he was caught in GIF form holding his head in disappointment during the Irish’s loss to Alabama in the BCS Championship:

According to the Honolulu Star-Advertiser, the woman who claims to be Lennay Kekua and who was once believed to be Te’o’s girlfriend, told Te’o that she faked her death in order to avoid drug dealers. This account came from a source close to the Te’o family. Kekua was believed to have died of leukemia back in September.

According to the report, Te’o received the news from the woman on Dec. 6 while he was in Florida for a postseason awards show. He informed Notre Dame that he was hoaxed on on Dec. 26, according to his statement.

According to Tuiasosopo’s friend, a female who anonymously spoke to Outside the Lines, Te’o was nothing more than a victim in the hoax. She also said Tuiasosopo admitted that Te’o was not the only person on whom he had played that type of hoax:

In addition to Tuiasosopo’s anonymous friend, Outside the Lines interviewed two people, J.R. Vaosa and Celeste Tuioti-Mariner, who said they had the same hoax played on them by Tuiasosopo:

The Irish player said that the team suspected something was up after Kekua passed away very soon after the death of his grandmother. Although the player said that Te’o was acting it up, he also placed some blame on the media for not fact-checking and figuring out the lie sooner than this.

It does make one wonder whether this anonymous player is telling the truth or not. On one hand, it’s anonymous. On the other hand, the original report from Deadspin came outside mainstream sources, and the pretty heated reaction from Notre Dame players seems to indicate there might be something to this story.

The story by Tyler Moorehead at CollegeSpun would indicate that other members of the Notre Dame football team didn’t buy Te’o’s dead girlfriend story, and saw it as a publicity stunt to fuel his Heisman campaign. Moorehead is of the belief that Te’o got caught up in the deception unwittingly, but kept it going, perhaps out of fear of being publicly embarrassed, or maybe seeing it as an opportunity to take his story to the next level.

It’s certainly possible that stories like this are true, and people knew something wasn’t right about Te’o’s relationship. It’s also possible that people are mad at Te’o for making a fool of them after they bought in so hard, and seizing the opportunity to come back at him for making them look bad. At this point, the only thing we really know is that somebody was fooled into believing a fake person had died. We’ll find out soon whether Te’o was fooled along with the rest of us.

If there is anything that we have learned as sports fans over the past year, it is that we ought not trust anything about the sports figures whom we think we know.

We have seen Joe Paterno’s legacy ripped to shreds by the issuance of the Freeh Report, leading Penn State to go from the Grand Experiment to suffering the worst sanctions since SMU received the death penalty. We’ve seen Lance Armstrong admit to use of banned substances, get stripped of his Tour de France titles, and then find himself crawling to Oprah’s couch in order to begin a Sisyphean quest for forgiveness. We are just a week removed from baseball ripping off the band-aid that covers its steroid era by engaging in an internal debate triggered by the Hall of Fame voting. At one stage, the sports culture viewed Paterno, Armstrong, Mark McGwire, and Sammy Sosa as paragons, as figures that meant something more than what they produced on the field. Now, those names are punch lines, but we go right on our merry way.

The story of Notre Dame linebacker Manti Te’o either being duped into believing he had a girlfriend named Lennay Kekua who eventually died of leukemia, making up a girlfriend and then pretend-cancering her or getting caught up in some combination of the two* might end up being the biggest unexpected sports story of the year.

Its coverage has dominated our site since it broke, along with almost any other outlet that covers college football, national television news, many outlets that don’t even cover sports, Twitter and so forth. By “so forth” I’m including things that happen off of the internet, whatever those things are -- when we all broke for dinner last night before Notre Dame athletic director Jack Swarbrick’s press conference, we talked about it and heard others at the next table talking about it, didn’t we? Then we marveled at Swarbrick, watched the resulting greatest Evening Jones episode ever, fell asleep reading about it and woke up a minute or two early to make sure we hadn’t missed anything (here’s the latest!) overnight?

Update: One of the users from below has denied involvement in hoaxing Manti Te’o, pinning it on Ronaiah Tuiasosopo.

Either Notre Dame linebacker Manti Te’o was tricked into believing he was in a long-distance relationship with a girl who died from leukemia (as he and Notre Dame claim and as one former Stanford opponent believes), or he invented said girl. Or something in between. And then there’s the question of motive, either on his part or the part of his tricksters or both. And then there’s the question of how this all slipped past sports media for so long. And then there are other questions raised by any answers we might be able to come up with at any point in there.

The overarching question after the first day of the surreal Manti Te’o girlfriend hoax story is: How could Te’o not have known? If what Te’o and Notre Dame are saying is true, and Te’o was involved in an “exclusively online” relationship with a woman he met three years ago and had never seen face-to-face, how could he not have discovered the scam earlier? How did he fall victim to multiple canceled visits to Hawaii, to the stories of car wrecks and leukemia, to late-night phone conversations with a figment of someone’s imagination?

As we all -- or, at least, as all of us but former Arizona Cardinals fullback Reagan Maui’a -- now know, the “relationship” between Te’o and his girlfriend was not a relationship at all, but a part of an elaborate hoax, that the Internet-only girlfriend was an illusion. It remains to be seen whether Te’o was complicit or simply incredibly, ridiculously gullible.

Te’o also claimed that she died of Leukemia just hours after his grandmother passed away in September. That is not true.

As the nation digests the story, many have looked to Te’o’s account on Twitter. He has nearly 171,000 followers now, and that number has surely skyrocketed in recent hours. Here are a couple of his more interesting tweets about, well, who really knows at this point?