The Crew last week, despite a brief but energy-sapping virus that cut short The Playhouse to a couple tortured and hastily put together sentences on an iPhone, hit on the Super Play yet again, running our record for the year to an impressive 23-10-2. That mark would be even better if not for a couple weeks ago, when we posted the Super Play of the Year: Notre Dame +10 -- a bet we never would have made had we known that a certain linebacker is either too stupid to live or magnificently depraved. Still, any way you slice it, 70 percent works out for everybody. For the record, this will never happen again.
A brief thought before getting to the Super Play of the Day ...
Speaking of Manti Te'o, the only thing more ridiculous than the story of his fictionalized girlfriend has been the mainstream media's collective sprint to give him the benefit of the doubt -- even though much of the publicly accessible evidence demonstrates that he doesn't deserve it.
After the former Notre Dame linebacker spoke to ESPN's Jeremy Schaap off camera on Friday night (a very transparent and pathetic ploy by his team of advisors to quell the story), many of the country's top sports reporters were quick to endorse Te'o's version of the events: That he was an unwitting victim of a hoax. He was duped, plain and simple, and Lennay Kekua, his purported girlfriend, unbeknownst to him never existed.
Sports Illustrated's Pete Thamel, who no thinking person in America should ever take seriously again after his embarrassing display on the Dan Patrick Show Friday morning, declared Te'o innocent of any involvement. Pat Forde of Yahoo! Sports did the same. And Schaap, in a very bizarre remote appearance on Sports Center immediately following his interview with Te'o where he seemingly refused to look at the camera and appeared to be on mescaline, did the same, saying he found Te'o 'credible and convincing.'
That Te'o admittedly lied about central elements of the story, namely that he had met Kekua in person when in fact he had not, seemed not to matter to them. That he didn't visit his supposedly cancer-stricken girl friend in the hospital or attend her funeral was, apparently, of no concern either. And that Notre Dame's own timeline of the events greatly contradicted much of what Te'o told Schaap, well, who the fuck cares about that. They all found him believable.
Listen, we don't know the whole story, and we doubt all the details of this sordid tale will ever fully emerge. What we do know, however, is that Manti Te'o is either borderline mentally retarded or one of the worst people on the planet. There's no other explanation. Maybe he's the former, and that's why Schaap has taken the public posture that he has.
Perhaps Schaap came out the interview saying to himself, "Whoa, that's the dumbest mother fucker alive -- there's no way I can go on national TV and eviscerate him for being a moron." Considering Te'o told reporters that Kekua was the love of his life despite the way she treated him (according the Schaap interview, she stood him up at least three times after he requested an in-person meeting, asked for his bank account number and concealed her identity when they chatted on the internet via Skype), that might very well be the case.
It's the only possible scenario that would make sense given some of the exemplary work Schaap has done in the past. Otherwise, he, and many others, have failed spectacularly on this story. Because almost everyone else can see that surely there's more to this story than a simple hoax.
Super Play of the Day
Falcons +4.5
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