As we all know now, Notre Dame linebacker Manti Te’o had a girlfriend who died, but it turns out she never existed. It’s a ridiculous story, and a lot of people are casting ideas on the water, but oddly I haven’t seen what I think is the most logical explanation of all this mess come from anywhere. This is not reporting; it’s definitely all supposition, and is not based on anything other than what’s already come out. It’s just an attempt to piece this together in the most logical fashion; in short, applying Occam’s Razor to the whole deal.
Imagine that Te’o met a girl online, and things clicked. He’s excited, he’s into it. It’s important to remember that even badass football players can suffer from self-esteem issues, and I don’t think it’s a stretch to suggest that football players known for humility and soft-spoken natures might fit into this category. So maybe Manti hasn’t been, shall we say, overly active with the ladies to this point. Guys his age in that situation… well, they tend to fall in love at the drop of a hat. Even with girls they’ve never met in person who talk to them nicely enough.
(Alternatively, maybe he’s a love addict, which is a thing; the reaction is similar.)
Either way, let’s assume that Te’o is devoted to his internet girlfriend even if he hasn’t met her yet. This isn’t unheard of, and if you’ve had any kind of long-term high-profile internet presence you know someone who’s been in the exact same boat. So his real-life buddies try to get him to hook up with, you know, real-life girls… and he declines. He has to explain why. And eventually, in order to duck away from the jibes of his buddies… at some point, he’s going to have to claim he’s met her. Think about it, and you know that’s the case.
So now, we have a guy who’s starting to build a lie for reasons which are pretty innocuous. Doesn’t make it right, but under the pressure of putting up with college-age friends who can be aggressive with their needling, it’s understandable. You say you’ve met the girl, everything changes. And at this point, Manti still believes it’s real; he’s just fibbed about one little detail.
And then, blam. The internet girlfriend dies. Now, we can argue that he should have seen the signs beforehand. The actual failures to meet when they’d arranged things. The convenient car accident which apparently cut off one scheduled attempt to meet. But is he naive? Well, he’s naive enough to form an attachment to a girl he hasn’t met, so… yes. So when she “dies”… it affects him in a very real way. He legitimately is mourning. Now, bear in mind, he’d lost his grandmother too. The timeline is sketchy, but most versions of it make it clear that he lost his grandmother first, and really that would be enough to get lots of sympathetic media coverage if he was trying to pull one over on everyone for nefarious reasons. So I think it’s reasonable to accept that the week of the Michigan State game, Manti Te’o really felt like he was playing for the memory of two people.
Then things started to unravel. Maybe he never noticed his dead girlfriend retweeting his tweet, but by December the game was lost. He knew. That brings up the final question: why didn’t he come clean then?
Embarrassment. Simple as that. If this had happened to you, would you be jumping at the chance to clear the matter up? Honestly? I’m not saying you wouldn’t, but you can sure understand the incentive. Or lack thereof, more accurately. Ultimately, having perpetrated an innocent lie, I think I would probably be motivated to come clean and explain things; doing so right then and there would have at least left my situation as merely the victim of a con rather than the potential party to one. But I’m not Manti Te’o, and if something like that happened to me it wouldn’t overwhelm Twitter and the media for an entire day (and likely much longer).
The only real hitch in the entire chain here is that Te’o is allegedly close to the guy who, allegedly, set all this in motion. That’s suspicious, but it also doesn’t mean anything. Maybe this dude — whose football career crapped out, remember — didn’t much like Manti. Jealousy, a grudge of some sort, whatever. That’s as reasonable an explanation as a conspiracy.
I could be completely wrong about this. Manti Te’o could be a cynical manipulator of the media. But I think it’s far more likely that he’s a human being who felt shame about having an internet girlfriend (the Anthony Michael Hall in The Breakfast Club jokes are devastatingly on-point here), told a little white lie to relieve the pressure, and then discovered that he was in a situation he couldn’t get himself out of without humiliating himself before an audience of millions.
I really have nothing to argue with.
It is also what I believe to be the most likely scenario.