Most everyone has been fooled sometime in your life. It usually happens sometime when you’re a kid, where the cute girl says that she likes you, but then laughs at you when you ask her to be your girlfriend. (What? I’m the only one where that happened?) Or maybe someone says that they’re going to give you the answers to a test and they end up making them all up. The point is, usually this happens when we’re young and gullible. The story of Manti Te’o takes the cake on the gullible scale, and he’s a 22 year old grown man.

For those who haven’t heard the story (and who hasn’t), Manti was an All-American, Heisman Trophy finalist for Notre Dame who had a girlfriend named Lennay Kekua who was also from his native Hawaii. Sounds like a good story, except this girlfriend didn’t really exist. He claims to have “met” her at Stanford and then began an online and telephone relationship with her over a few months and claimed to be very much in love with the girl. He claimed to have spent hours every night with her on the phone just falling asleep with her on the other end. Then things took a turn for the worse, when Te’o was told that his girlfriend had Leukemia and eventually passed away from the disease right before the season. He played the entire season with not only her death on his mind, but also his grandmother, (who is real by the way) who passed away on the same day from a long standing illness. He carried those stories through the season, gaining national attention alongside Notre Dame’s undefeated season. Now it’s come out that Lennay doesn’t exist, nor has she ever existed. Details as to why and how this has happened are sketchy at best, so I’ve only got speculation. I have heard and formulated three different reasons how this whole thing came out.

Manti is the mastermind – This is obviously the worst case scenario for fans of Notre Dame and Te’o himself. The idea that a person could go through this much of a ruse just to get attention seems laughable. It would also call into question his mental state. Manti is obviously an extremely intelligent individual, you don’t get into Notre Dame without being a smart man, but if he indeed faked the whole thing for attention, it would show a level of delusion that not many have shown before. I highly doubt that this is the answer.

Someone is fooling him – Manti has said that he is the victim of a hoax, and that he had no knowledge that someone was tricking him. He says he was being :”catfished.”

The phenomenon called “catfishing” is where someone will create a false online profile and meet someone online with the intention to deceive. I find it difficult to believe this one due to the fact that Manti is supposedly a smart guy. I imagine that if I were in his situation and I met some girl online, I’d use all available technology to speak to her. 10 years ago I can understand that he’d only be able to speak to her via online chat or on the phone. Nowadays we have Skype, FaceTime, and all sorts of other methods of face to face talking. With my cell phone I can call my sister and video chat with her from anywhere I have a cell phone signal. The Skype system is really quite amazing. The idea that Manti just took whatever reason as to why the person could never meet just makes him seem, dare I say, dumb.

He’s covering something up – I hope this isn’t the case, I really don’t believe this without more evidence, and it’s not my theory,  but I feel that it should be brought up: What if Manti is in the closet? If he is, I have no issue of course, but he is a devoutly raised Mormon man going to the premier catholic school in America. The idea of him coming out while playing football and having that upbringing would be terrifying to him. So why do some people theorize this? Well he’s a good looking kid and the absolute #1 star of the most popular college football team in America. As we’ve seen with people like Johnny Manziel and AJ McCarron, they usually get the girl if you know what I mean. People would have expected Manti to have a beautiful Notre Dame student wearing his jersey in the stands, yet he never had anyone in the stands for him. It’s possible that a story like this might have come out in order to push aside any questions as to why he didn’t have that cute girl in the stands. If this is the case (and again, I don’t believe it and I won’t say that this is the case without a LOT more evidence) it would end up being the biggest story in sports history, where someone came out while being an active player. That has never happened before.

What’s the right answer? Well, without Manti coming forward and explaining his situation (as of writing this article he hasn’t come out and had a press conference), we can only speculate. We do know that Notre Dame is 100% behind him, as their athletic director has said on record that they believe Manti feels he was the victim of a huge hoax. Like I said before, without more evidence I don’t believe he’s covering up anything about himself, and I don’t think he just made everything up for attention. So the only logical idea is that it’s some sort of mixture. He probably did meet someone, and then he talked to someone online and on the phone. I imagine that this continued for a while and he started to get feelings for this person, but once he found out that Lennay was a fraud, he figured that it would humiliate him if this got out, so he said that she “died” to get her to go away, never imagining that it would spiral out of control. Once that lie about her dying was out he had to continue going with it, causing the whole thing to snowball. The sad thing, as it is usually in these situations, is that if Manti had just come out and said “someone tricked me, I was fooled, I won’t let it happen again,” then we’d have made a joke or two, and then forgotten all about it once Notre Dame started playing so well. Now, we have nothing to distract this story, and Manti will be the front and center of every story until the truth comes out. Life lessons kids: The cover up is always worse than the crime. I hope it works out for him, as he seems to be a good kid, but this is a tough time for a young adult who made a big mistake.