Manti Te’o controversy: Notre Dame teammates were skeptical about girlfriend

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?

From the start, teammates were skeptical about Te’o’s relationship with a girl they had never met. Yet with a leader like Te’o, a guy that was so very clearly cut from a different cloth, it was difficult to challenge a teammate that had always walked around with a conviction and belief system so very different than most 21-year-olds. And if that meant a long-distance, heart-tugging relationship for Te’o that only existed during late-night phone calls and Twitter exchanges, then teammates were quick to shrug their shoulders at a boyfriend-girlfriend dynamic that was just as unusual as their once-in-a-generation teammate.

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.