Maryland's Upset and the Bizarre Story of Manti Te'o's Fake Girlfriend

Whew…what a bizarre past 24 hours in the sports world. Before we examine a story that’s beginning to take a life of its own, let’s stay local and sporsty first. Maryland staged a mild but much needed upset last night at home against NC State off an Alex Len tip-in with less than a second to play. The game was ugly, but it was a game the Terps had to have…especially considering the tough ACC road schedule they have coming up. And ugly might be the way this Maryland team has to get it done for most of this season, as Mark Turgeon’s roster of mostly freshmen and sophomores is not exactly an offensive juggernaut. The brutally honest Turgeon basically said after the game that the offense is s***, and his team can’t even execute plays diagrammed seconds before during timeouts. Still, these Terps play hard enough and good enough defensively that they are at least going to be competitive in most games despite their offensive ineptitude.

Alex Len's tip-in saved Maryland from a 1-3 start in conference.

Now, where to even start with this Manti Te’o business…without going into every detail, the story that Te’o’s girlfriend died of leukemia during the season appears to be some kind of hoax. Aside from that, the details are pretty, well, not clear at the moment. To re-hash every angle of this would take an entire post in and of itself, so I’m not going to do that. It eerily reminds me of an Internet hoax I read about on The Chive where a woman created an online persona pretending to be a paraplegic with a Twitter handle, “Dave on Wheels.” This false identity gained tons of followers because it portrayed an uplifting story of this guy who seemed to have a great sense of humor and outlook on life despite his apparent condition. The whole thing was based on some fantasy or alternate reality created in this woman’s mind though, and when it got too big and gained too much pub she basically killed off Dave on Wheels. People were heartbroken, but they did a little digging and found out the entire story was made up. In this instance, we also have the added longstanding problem of people trying to latch onto upcoming athletes for one reason or another. Based on this idea and what I have heard and read, this is my theory:

Te’o and this person started an online relationship that eventually grew more serious. The person at some point wanted to end the fantasy or whatever, and killed the girlfriend persona off (much like the person behind Dave on Wheels did). Because of the world of social media, this info got out, and Te’o embellished the relationship to make it seem like they had a relationship in person as well…not because he wanted notoriety, but because he was somewhat embarrassed about the situation (again, this is just me speculating). Te’o is a high profile, young, good looking dude by my own admission…maybe he was humiliated that this person he had fallen for was just someone he knew through tweets, emails, and text messages. The only problem is that in this day and age, everyone finds out everything eventually.

All the dirty details will come out eventually, but this story is icky no matter the ending.

Maybe I’m naïve, and maybe Te’o really was just trying to drum-up some publicity (in the creepiest, most psychotic way ever), but something doesn’t smell right about that idea to me. The risk-reward of that plan just seems far too risky, and after their own investigation Notre Dame seems to be backing Te’o 100% as well…which they wouldn’t do if they had any doubt about his story at all. The next few days will tell whether or not I’m right, but just 1 more way the Internet is bringing about the wacky and bizarre in today’s world.