Manti Te'o is reportedly readying himself for a sit down interview with an as yet unknown network and broadcaster.
Less than 24 hours after the Deadspin.com story broke about the non-existence of the Notre Dame linebacker's girlfriend, Te'o has become a national punchline.
Kudos to those who realize that a sensitive and impressionable young man is at the center of it, who at worst perpetrated the hoax and at best merely kept it alive, after learning last month that he had been pranked.
Deadspin.com, part of the Gawker publishing group reported that its interest was stirred after receiving a lead from someone claiming to know that the Te'o story was bogus.
A scoop like this is worth gold in today's competitive news market. While the general public might not realize it, those who follow sports, particularly college sports know about Te'o and about the power of the story.
Had Deadspin not followed the lead it wouldn't have been doing what it's supposed to.
The fact that the folks there got to show up everyone else, like SI.com, ESPN and print journalists who covered Te'o just helps them feel better about it all.
There is something that repels us while drawing us in. There is a sadness to this that begs for it all to stop, while we understand that this is a runaway train and the national curiosity must be satisfied.
Manti Te'o made this a public story and we learned from the Notre Dame press conference on Wednesday, he kept it going in interviews that surrounded the BCS Championship game a couple of weeks ago.
He can't ask for privacy now.
He will be entering the NFL Draft and it's fair to wonder how teams will view him after this revelation.
They might wonder if he is a born liar or mentally unstable and are waiting to hear how he handles this from this moment forward. Neither has to be true.
Perhaps we'll learn from Te'o that indeed he only learned of the hoax less than a month ago and he and Notre Dame didn't want to announce something that would have taken away from the BCS Championship moment.
While it seems that Deadspin took this story and got to its core in rapid fashion, who could blame Notre Dame from taking its time?
Te'o would have been happy to sit tight until sometime later. The question for him and the university is now much later?
There are other questions about how he allowed his family to speak about meeting the girl in person without correcting the statements. How credible is it that he never went to her bedside or her funeral?
While we want our curiosity satisfied it will be up to those that seek to employ the young linebacker to find a path through this current morass.
Manti Te'o did the unthinkable. He put Lance Armstrong and his interview with Oprah off the front pages. Both are stories of deception, but this one is so much sadder. Read: Would Lance say under oath what he's telling Oprah?
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