Te'o clearly had motives between gaining exposure for awards and attention which he seemed to love.

What I'm wondering is wtf Tuiasiopo would be getting out of this.

if jarvis jones has a fake gf fake die the week before the florida game he wins the heisman.

Tuiasosopo probably thought it was hilarious at the time. The amount of time he put into the hoax is greatly exaggerated imo.

At some point the media picked up on the story and T'eo ran with it.

I don't know exactly how in on it Te'o was, but this is correct with regards to awards.

Te'o is not really that remarkable a defender. He's quite good, but it would have been a joke if he won the Heisman. It was already a joke that he was there, as he's not even the best defender in CFB, the best lineback in CFB, and he's not really even that close. Jarvis Jones, Jadeveon Clowney and a few others are clearly superior.

(Aside - Jarvis Jones's tragic personal background is actually real, btw. Older brother murdered when Jarvis was 15, nearly dropped out of school due to emotional issues related to that. Adopted by a foster family and works through it, becomes football star, graduates. Breaks neck freshman year at USC, told he will never play again. Gets more opinions and comes to UGA and becomes a star. Actual overcoming of adversity imo.)

Te'o got all this play because ND was undefeated and because of his story. He absolutely would not be raking in the awards and attention without the story.

real girlfriends tho...

Short black guy behind Johnny looks to be getting punched

did the media "pick up" on this story before the 2 deaths on the same day?

So Bill Polian said on ESPN that the way this is going to play out between Manti, his agents and NFL teams is going to be basically full confidential disclosure of exactly what happened and then they will have the choice to go with it or not.

I think at the end of the day, being a circumstantial liar is not as bad as what a lot of college athletes do, and if he can own up to exactly what parts of the story were embellished and come out with the whole truth from his POV in a way teams see as completely honest, he will still get drafted.

WHO TALKED TO HIM FOR EIGHT HOURS?!

What did they talk about? Who the hell could make up a story for eight hours and for what? For lulz?

I guess I will go with originally pranked and played it for all it is worth regardless of when he knew.

Why believe anything he has to say anyway. And lolND investigation.

if Hoya/horrowshow/other lawyers on the internet see this, care to estimate about the cost of a few escape goats in a situation like this? you need ppl to take the hit and stfu, how much roughly? (if say CAA was interested in that sort of thing)

Haven't seen this mentioned ITT yet:

From http://espn.go.com/college-football/...rlfriend-angle

Notre Dame was promoting a charity event in Lennay Kekua's name on Tuesday, January 15th. That's 3 days ago!

That....... is ****ing incredible.

and in a way this statement perfectly captures how awesomely absurd this situation is. so ty

People keep talking about this girl who was on the phone every night for weeks. Do we have any evidence of this existing besides Te'o saying that happened? I might be mixing up stories here, but my impression is:

-Te'o was duped into have some sort of online relationship, but never considered the girl his gf. Might have embellished it a little bit with his friends but nothing too crazy. This started in 2011, sometime before the Stanford game (because he apparently asked a Stanford player if he knew Lennay)
-Minor catfishing over the next year, but again nothing too crazy
-He finds out that the girl "died" and plays up the girlfriend angle when everyone gave him all that attention
-Discovers it's a hoax and decides, **** it, let's roll with it
-Retroactively makes up stories about how he met her in 2009 (when in reality the hoax started in 2011), how much time he spent on the phone with her and how much he loved her, etc.

Te'o could be telling the truth about being hoaxed from 2011-2012 and still have never talked to anyone. My impression is that was all stuff made up later for the publicity (including stuff about meeting her in 2009, etc). So this wasn't as long or as elaborate a hoax as people thought, just something that Te'o majorly embellished later.

pretty sure here they'll just claim miscommunication between departments, etc

like the coaches knew, but whoever was in charge of green-lighting the charity thing didn't

blah blah blah

I'm going with this unless/until some hard evidence comes out otherwise

Pretty much this. We've already established that he lied about meeting her and his teammates didn't even really consider her his "girlfriend".

Not much of a stretch to think he made up all those over-night phone calls as well.

"escape goats"? really?

I want to apologize to Manti Teo For What I Did

The Onion

I think circumstantial liar puts this extremely lightly.

He told an enormous lie on an enormous scale that is indicative of a significant personality disorder. There's a reason why this is such a huge news story, this **** doesn't happen to normal people.

So basic Te'o defense:

- He liked the attention of having this seemingly hot Stanford girl interested in him, and he could keep her interest while going out and banging other chicks, etc.
- He thought the relationship with her was a total joke and probably thought of her as a not secret admirer, and maybe after a game at Stanford he could meet up and get laid, cool.
- Then the whole getting in a car accident, getting leukemia happened, so he all of a sudden took this admirer who he barely knew and decided he would milk this for all its worth, as clearly the girl was down with this bull**** story and sounding like she was so close to Te'o.
- He thinks she is real and is going through these problems, but he isn't really that involved with communicating with her.
- She dies and he def feels bad, etc. Even though everyone knows she is more or less a person he barely knows and is acting a little too sad, his grandmother did just die, so it makes sense this wouldn't make him feel any better.

He really had been hoaxed and just lied about the amount of communication he had with her to make them seem a ton closer than they were. At the end of the day he really thought she was this amazing person and with the few details he knew about her he filled in the blanks.

It is a huge stretch but I can almost convince myself I believe it if he were to admit to lying about the frequency and quantity of times they conversed.

haha

indeed

Man, should have know Rufio from Hook was up to no good

Apparently the girl is one of Tuiasosopo's cousins. Should narrow it down to about 40 girls.