Statement Analysis: Manti Te'o of Notre Dame

Statements previously made show deception on the part of the player, Manti Te'o. Why did he do it?  Why invent a story of a dying girlfriend, and overcoming this adversity on the football field?

 Was it to up his chances for bigger contract in NFL?  

Did he really need more attention?  

See story below quotes here.  Note the dates.  The language is not from experiential memory.  Lack of commitment and sensory detail, as well as attempt to persuade are noted.  

"We met just, um, just she knew my cousin."  

And kinda saw me there, so.  

Note the lack of commitment to his statement.  

The word "just" is often used to compare downwards, as in minimizing something.  

Why would he minimize knowing his own girlfriend?  This is not expected of someone's "love" of his life. The downplaying of the relationship may be due to the internal stress of lying and not wanting to outright lie.  

Just kinda regular. 

But she saw me at the USC game of my sophomore year.  We were still just friends, we

were acquaintances. "

Here we have a change of language:  they went from "just friends" to "acquaintances" without any justification within the context.  Words do not change on their own.  Emotions have the most powerful impact upon words and cause change.  When language changes, and there is no justification in context, it may indicate the subject is not speaking from memory.  

The word "but" is often used to rebut that which preceded it.  We see this word placed in artificially in deceptive statements, as there is nothing to rebut. It may be that the subject is, in a  strange sense, rebutting his own assertion.  

"I think I'll never forget the time when I found out that, you know, my girlfriend passed away.  And the first person to run to my aid was my defensive coordinator, Coach Diaco, and, you know, he said something very profound to me, he said, 'this is where your faith is tested.' Right after that, I ran into the players' lounge and I got on the phone with my parents and I opened my eyes and my Head Coach was sitting right there. And so, you know, there are a hundred plus people on our team and the defensive coordinator and our Head Coach took time to just go get one (of those players).  You know I think that was the most meaningful to me.  

"I think I'll never forget the time when I found out that, you know, my girlfriend passed away.  

Note the lack of commitment here, with "think"; allowing for him to "think" otherwise, or for others to "think" contrary to what he asserts. 

Please note that having your girlfriend die is not likely something that will need a trigger for your memory. 

Strangeness continues:  

People often speak of where they were at a particular important time in history, whether personal or public.  "Where were you when 9/11 hit?" is a common example.  

People generally do not speak of remembering the "time" of an event; instead, they remember a place. 

Why?

A "time" is a signal on the clock, but a "place" is far more sensory in description.  People often remember where they were when they heard shattering news, including what they were doing, and who they were with.  They don't normally associate the event with a click on the clock.  

He does not speak of her, personally, which is unexpected, but of the "time" he found out.  

Note, "my girlfriend" avoids using her name, which, given that she was supposed to have "passed away", is very unusual.  Death is something very close.  This unnatural use of "my girlfriend", without using her name with the title, seems to speak more to the need to emphasize, in a juvenile like manner, that she really was his "girlfriend."

And the first person to run to my aid was my defensive coordinator, Coach Diaco, and, you know, he said something very profound to me, he said, 'this is where your faith is tested.' Right after that, I ran into the players' lounge and I got on the phone with my parents and I opened my eyes and my Head Coach was sitting right there. 

Note body posture in all statements. 

Here, the first person "ran" to his aid. 

Next, he "ran" into the players' lounge. 

Then, he "opened" his eyes;

Head coach was "sitting"

This is indicative of not only tension, but story telling.  

Note that the phone call is likely to be significant to the deception. 

And so, you know, there are a hundred plus people on our team and the defensive coordinator and our Head Coach took time to just go get one (of those players).  You know I think that was the most meaningful to me.  

Note what was most meaningful to him was not the loss of his girlfriend, but that the defensive coordinator (he does not use the name here) and the Head Coach took time to get a player. 

I can think of things more meaningful when losing a girlfriend than 2 coaches getting a player for him. 

When asked how she died:

"It was just so sudden.  I don't know the details of it.  It was just a surprise. "

Manti Te'o has already tried to explain how his heartwarming story of playing through adversity was a lie he wasn't responsible for, how he was the victim of a cruel hoax about a dead girlfriend who never existed.

He still has questions to answer, with many wondering whether he was a victim or participant in the scam. Those doubts even extended to his own campus, where he is one of the most popular players in Notre Dame's storied history.

"Whenever Manti decides to speak I'll bet the entire campus will stop what they're doing and watch what he has to say," Notre Dame student body president Brett Rocheleau said Thursday. "I think the majority of students believe in Manti. They just want to hear him answer these final few questions and hear the story from his point of view."

When Te'o will do that, like so much else about this story, is still a mystery.

An Associated Press review of news coverage found that Te'o talked about his doomed love in a Web interview on Dec. 8 and again in a newspaper interview published Dec. 10. He and the university said he learned on Dec. 6 that it was all a hoax - not only was she not dead, she wasn't real.

On Thursday, a day after the bizarre news broke, there were questions about whether he really was duped, as he claimed, or whether he and the university were complicit in the hoax and misled the public, perhaps to improve his chances of winning the Heisman. He came in second, propelled by one of the most compelling plot lines of the season.

Yahoo sports columnist Dan Wetzel said the case has "left everyone wondering whether this was really the case of a naïve football player done wrong by friends or a fabrication that has yet to play to its conclusion."

Gregg Doyel, national columnist for CBSSports.com, was more direct.

"Nothing about this story has been comprehensible, or logical, and that extends to what happens next," he wrote. "I cannot comprehend Manti Te'o saying anything that could make me believe he was a victim."

On Wednesday, Te'o and Notre Dame athletic director Jack Swarbrick said the player was drawn into a virtual romance with a woman who used the phony name Lennay Kekua, and was fooled into believing she died of leukemia in September. They said his only contact with the woman was via the Internet and telephone. Te'o was not at the news conference; the school released a 225-word statement from him.

Te'o also lost his grandmother - for real - the same day his girlfriend supposedly died, and his role in leading Notre Dame to its best season in decades endeared him to fans and put him at the center of one of college football's feel-good stories of the year.

Relying on information provided by Te'o's family members, the South Bend Tribune reported in October that Te'o and Kekua first met, in person, in 2009, and that the two had also gotten together in Hawaii, where Te'o grew up.

Sports Illustrated posted a previously unpublished transcript of a one-on-one interview with Te'o from Sept. 23. In it, he goes into great detail about his relationship with Kekua and her physical ailments. He also mentioned meeting her for the first time after a game in California.

"We met just, ummmm, just she knew my cousin. And kind of saw me there so. Just kind of regular," he told SI.

Among the outstanding questions: Why didn't Te'o ever clarify the nature of his relationship as the story took on a life of its own?

Te'o's agent, Tom Condon, said the athlete had no plans to make any public statements in Bradenton, Fla., where he has been training with other NFL hopefuls at the IMG Academy.

Notre Dame said Te'o found out that Kekua was not a real person through a phone call he received at an awards ceremony in Orlando, Fla., on Dec. 6. He told Notre Dame coaches about the situation on Dec. 26.

The AP's media review turned up two instances during that gap when the football star mentioned Kekua in public.

Te'o was in New York for the Heisman presentation on Dec. 8 and, during an interview before the ceremony that ran on the WSBT.com, the website for a South Bend TV station, Te'o said: "I mean, I don't like cancer at all. I lost both my grandparents and my girlfriend to cancer. So I've really tried to go to children's hospitals and see, you know, children."

In a column that first ran in The Los Angeles Times, on Dec. 10, Te'o recounted why he played a few days after he found out Kekua died in September, and the day she was supposedly buried.

"She made me promise, when it happened, that I would stay and play," he said on Dec. 9 while attending a ceremony in Newport Beach, Calif., for the Lott Impact Awards.

On Wednesday, when Deadspin.com broke the story, Swarbrick said Notre Dame did not go public with its findings sooner because it expected the Te'o family to come forward first.

Asked if the NCAA was monitoring the Te'o story for possible rules violations, NCAA President Mark Emmert said:

"We don't know anything more than you do," he told reporters at the organization's convention in Dallas. "We're learning about this through the stories just the same as you are. But we have to wait and see what really transpired there. It's obviously (a) very disturbing story and it's hard to tell where the facts lie at this point.

"But Notre Dame is obviously looking into it and there will be a lot more to come forward. Right now, it just looks ... well, we don't know what the facts are, so I shouldn't comment beyond that."