2012 NCAA College Football Thread

[gunnar hendershow]

Alright guys, for the purpose of anonymity I'm going to spare everyone the real personal details and just do a brief summary. For well over a year I was in a relationship with a girl who was very ill, she spent most of the time in the hospital and I was there for her regularly, spent nights at the hospital, and helped her out to the best of my abilities. We broke up, we remain on good terms, and she's still very ill. Anyway, as someone who has experienced this I have to say that I am incredibly disgusted by Te'o, anyone who was in on this with him, and anyone who wants to try to protect him. What he did is an absolute insult to anyone who saw his story and felt inspired by it because they could relate to his struggle, or just was inspired because of how strong he seemed to be.

Anyone, and I mean anyone, who stood there and said "We'll get you out of this Manti" or "It's not that serious" or "I'll pretend the whole thing is true" (Reagan Mauia) has a serious character flaw. This is absolutely disgusting. It's not weird, it's not shocking, it's sick. There's no punishment we can give them, nothing is illegal, but I hope they learn to deal with the guilt of not just lying to the country but toying with people who have been directly affected by watching someone suffer with an illness or die.

[HailtotheYo]

^ yeah ... my best friend in HS was in a serious accident the summer before I want to college. I was there at some point every single day over that summer before I left. For a while it was life/death seriousness .... now that I've gotten over the initial WTF NO WAY of it, I'm pretty damned disgusted.

[GhostMachine]

Either way, Te'o is either one of the biggest idiots (for falling for it) or biggest assholes (for being part of it), and I kind of hope he turns out to be one of those players who is great in college but a waste of roster space in the NFL.

There are too many holes in the story for him to be believable as a victim in all this.

[Maxx]

I can tell a really long, increasingly ridiculous story about an online "relationship" I was involved with for about 6 months, that came in the form of many, many phone calls but never any in person meetings. It's a bizarre situation that involves too much truth to easily dismiss it as a hoax and too much ridiculousness to accept it as truth.

If I actually believed Te'o had nothing to do with this, I'd sympathize with him. But that Deadspin article cites far too many stories about him meeting her for me to believe that.

[ROC]

Has anyone on here broached the theory that Manti created this terrifying lie because he didn't want to be outed as gay? I'm finding that theory to be doubtful, but are we still that closeted as a sports culture for people to have to go to absurd lengths to do this to avoid the consequences? Unfortunately, that's probably the case especially considering a school like Notre Dame is pretty gross in terms of sweeping sexuality (and thus sex crimes like the Lizzy Seeberg allegations of sexual assault) under the rug.

[Fait Accompli]

This guy Justin Megahan's twitter timeline is rather fascinating right now. He's doing some digging in the story, finding old tweets that had been deleted.

[ROC]

http://www.sbnation.com/college-football/2013/1/17/3885652/manti-teo-girlfriend-hoax-twitter

And now it gets weirder. Several tweets claim as far as December 4th that this was a hoax akin to Catfish and seem to lend the idea that perhaps Manti was duped.

Basically a lot of what Fait Accompli's link shows.

[gunnar hendershow]

What I don't get is that they supposedly had face-to-face meetings. There are a lot of holes there if he wasn't in on it yet claimed to have met her.

[Adam]

If somebody actually physically fronted as this woman and duped Te'o, and even Mauia, then maybe it is believable Te'o was the victim of a big elaborate hoax.

But really if that were the case many things don't add up - like the Twitter postings using pictures of a totally random woman who claims to have never met Te'o.

This is just mental.

[HailtotheYo]

He's on record in an ESPN interview from October in regards to having met her. So if it's indeed a true hoax and he is completely innocent in terms of involvement ... then someone looking very much like the girl they stole the Facebook photos from HAD to have played the part.

This entire thing is ridiculous, amazing, and unbelievably crazy on so many levels.

[DMN in the House]

I haven't read much on it, but the only believable way out of it is if it's a front because he's afraid to come out as homosexual. That's a completely understandable situation.

Other than that, I'm loathe to call it a catfish situation, because he claimed to have met her, but having watched that show, you might be surprised at the type of shit that can happen.

[DMN in the House]

Holy shit, the girl that's supposed to actually be in the Facebook pictures is from my hometown.

http://m.bleacherreport.com/articles/1488074-major-takeaways-from-deadspins-report-on-manti-teo?hpt=hp_t3

[gunnar hendershow]

I read it was his parents who said they met in person, and Manti says they met online in 2011.

I guess I'll have to watch the ESPN interview to see if he says they had met in person. It is possible he's embarrassed by the whole thing, but parts of the story don't add up unless he really lied to his parents about details of this relationship.

[DMN in the House]

Possibly hiding his sexuality from his parents as well. Easy to see a lie about a long distance relationship snowballing into something he couldn't control.

[TCO]

If he was just trying to hide his sexuality though, why not just say they broke up rather than very publicly and repeatedly say she died of leukemia? Also how exactly did he recieve conformation that she had "died". If this is a hoax it's a very detailed one and had a lot of people involved. I really have no idea what's going on here but there's a lot that hasn't been revealed yet and will have to come out eventually.

[Fait Accompli]

If he was just trying to hide his sexuality though, why not just say they broke up rather than very publicly and repeatedly say she died of leukemia? Also how exactly did he recieve conformation that she had "died". If this is a hoax it's a very detailed one and had a lot of people involved. I really have no idea what's going on here but there's a lot that hasn't been revealed yet and will have to come out eventually.

Because you don't wanna be the guy who broke up with the girl who has cancer.

[TCO]

If he was just trying to hide his sexuality though, why not just say they broke up rather than very publicly and repeatedly say she died of leukemia? Also how exactly did he recieve conformation that she had "died". If this is a hoax it's a very detailed one and had a lot of people involved. I really have no idea what's going on here but there's a lot that hasn't been revealed yet and will have to come out eventually.

Because you don't wanna be the guy who broke up with the girl who has cancer.

But the girl isn't real anyway, he could've never said she had leukemia, said she recovered or never went to the press about the whole deal to begin with. If he were trying to hide his sexuality then the whole cancer story could've been avoided and a healthy fictional online girlfriend presented instead.

There's something incredibly strange about this whole thing.

[Fait Accompli]

If he was just trying to hide his sexuality though, why not just say they broke up rather than very publicly and repeatedly say she died of leukemia? Also how exactly did he recieve conformation that she had "died". If this is a hoax it's a very detailed one and had a lot of people involved. I really have no idea what's going on here but there's a lot that hasn't been revealed yet and will have to come out eventually.

Because you don't wanna be the guy who broke up with the girl who has cancer.

But the girl isn't real anyway, he could've never said she had leukemia, said she recovered or never went to the press about the whole deal to begin with. If he were trying to hide his sexuality then the whole cancer story could've been avoided and a healthy fictional online girlfriend presented instead.

There's something incredibly strange about this whole thing.

The thing is, if we are under the belief that he's in on the hoax, the narrative around him doesn't benefit from his girlfriend not having leukemia (or her recovering from it) and him breaking up with her.

And you're right; this whole entire story is bizarre to say the least. If what he's saying is true and he was the victim, then he's a pretty awful boyfriend for not at least trying to force the hand of his girlfriend by coming out to see her while she's in the hospital with leukemia.

[Cactus Drags]

I read it was his parents who said they met in person, and Manti says they met online in 2011.

I guess I'll have to watch the ESPN interview to see if he says they had met in person. It is possible he's embarrassed by the whole thing, but parts of the story don't add up unless he really lied to his parents about details of this relationship.

That has apparently been cancelled.

I'm paying a lot of attention to this story, when I don't massively follow college football and don't care about some stupid football player being involved in or falling for a fake girlfriend story. What absolutely fascinates me is how the entirety of the American sports media just reported the narrative as gospel truth without doing any fact-checking or ignoring the "red flags" that were perceived (the guy who wrote the SI story failed to find an obit, graduation record etc. and just "wrote around it"). It's insane that in an age when it's so easy to dig information up, nobody did. No one ever thought it was a little off that her death was reported as being on four different dates? Different accounts couldn't agree whether it was before or after the death of his grandmother? Christ, the AP reported that the funeral took place in a city that doesn't even fucking exist!

[GhostMachine]

Too many holes and inconsistencies in the story for me to believe he's a victim. Though I'm not too sure what his motivation in all this would be.