We look forward to getting back to Notre Dame football coverage. With college all-star games being played and recruiting taking some wild twists and turns, getting the focus off the soap opera surrounding Manti Te’o would be a welcome change after a very long night and morning.
Still, it’s hard to quantify just how large this story has gotten. Our initial reaction piece led the coverage on NBC News’ website, and we are well on our way to an all-time daily high for pageviews. In a story that gets more and more confusing (not to mention depressing) the deeper you dig, a hoax likely perpetrated by a young man hiding out in his parents house in Palmdale, California, still has a few chapters to be written.
Yet this story will have trouble advancing until we hear from Te’o. And while he and his new team are busy at work likely preparing for an onslaught of media attention, the All-American linebacker certainly has some explaining to do.
But let’s take a look at this story from a few more angles:
DRAFT STOCK
Does this hurt Manti Te’o’s draft stock? Only 32 decision makers can answer that, though it won’t stop most of us from talking about it for the next few months. That said, each and every team will have an opportunity to go one-on-one with Te’o at the NFL scouting combine, where they’ll get the linebacker free of his agent and media team. There will be some pretty intense discussions in Indianapolis, and you’ll like hear that Te’o came out of each and every one of them in good shape.
Some journalists have downgraded Te’o, even if he wasn’t in on the hoax, because he was duped. That led a guy like Skip Bayless to downgrade Te’o’s “intangibles,” while pulling away from his previous comparison to Ray Lewis. It shouldn’t be hard for guys like Skip to think back and remember when Ray Lewis was entangled in his own media mess. And it was a lot worse than falling in love with an imaginary girlfriend.
But making Te’o the face of your franchise might have gotten a lot tougher for teams picking at the top of the first round. And even if he runs and tests and talks as well as anyone could hope in the months leading to the draft, that perception might be hard to overlook.
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THE FOOTBALL PROGRAM
While Te’o is no longer a part of the Irish football program, Notre Dame saw fit to spend an hour answering questions and discussing candidly what they knew about the situation, filling in important pieces in the timeline, and putting the onus on their former star linebacker to tell his side of the story.
It’s been a chaotic 10 days for the Irish football program. After being embarrassed against Alabama on the biggest stage of college football, the program hung in limbo while head coach Brian Kelly pondered the Philadelphia Eagles job that eventually went to Oregon head coach Chip Kelly. Players, staff members and coaches didn’t really know what Kelly planned to do, but when he said he was coming back, the Irish got a huge boost. But all of that is up for grabs after yesterday’s revelations.
Cynics will connect the Te’o story to some media machine working double-time to promote the Fighting Irish. But those same cynics seem to have selective memory, especially thinking back to August when that very same machine had backed its tires over the Notre Dame football program and left it for dead.
This was a situation Notre Dame knew would eventually be exposed and the university’s immediate statement and Swarbrick’s press conference showed the seriousness of it all. Expect Brian Kelly to field questions when he’s back from recruiting, adding another layer of fun to Signing Day.
THE RECRUITING CLASS
It might be a stretch to think that anything happening in the media could directly effect the Irish’s recruiting efforts. But don’t think this punch line isn’t appreciated by teams working overtime to protect their players from the hard charging Irish coaching staff.
Notre Dame is still on pace to have one of the more exciting weekends in January the football program has ever seen. The Irish will welcome touted defensive lineman Eddie Vanderdoes, along with a handful of other players next weekend, all entertaining the idea of filling the final spots in this heralded recruiting class.
Yet this situation will most definitely come up in the living rooms of recruits everywhere. In many ways, it might have taken the spotlight off Brian Kelly, a guy who looked like he had one foot out the door to some earlier in the week.
The Irish have too good of a class to let anything fall apart in the next few weeks, and are well on their way to laying the tracks for their 2014 class. But this is sure to have recruits -- the majority of whom spend a ton of time online -- paying attention. For good reasons and bad.
