Photo by Mike Ehrmann/Getty Images. 
 
 As Deadspin laid out in brutal detail on Wednesday, Notre Dame linebacker Manti Te’o’s dead girlfriend is neither dead nor Manti Te’o’s girlfriend nor a corporeal being. Te’o and Lennay Kekua never met on the field at Stanford, never hung out together in Hawaii, and didn’t talk on the phone each night as she lay dying of leukemia. As we wait to learn more details of this amazing hoax, it’s worth examining the second-biggest mystery of the Manti Te’o fake girlfriend saga: How did the sports media come to spread this phony story? 
 
 Josh Levin Josh Levin is Slate’s editorial director. 
 
 The writer who did the most to popularize Te’o’s tale of triumph over tragedy was Sports Illustrated’s Pete Thamel. In late September, Thamel wrote that the Notre Dame star “played remarkably well under the most depressing of circumstances—the death of his girlfriend and grandmother within [a] 24-hour span before the Irish's game against Michigan State.” (The part about his grandmother's death is true.) In the Oct. 1 edition of the magazine, which placed Te’o on the cover and noted that the linebacker “has restored the shine to the Golden Dome,” Thamel reported the precise date of Lennay Kekua’s supposedly almost-deadly car accident (April 28) and stated that her “relatives told [Te’o] that at her lowest points, as she fought to emerge from a coma, her breathing rate would increase at the sound of his voice.” And in a Dec. 20 piece, Thamel explained that Kekua wrote Te’o a series of inspirational notes before her passing, and that her brother Kainoa and sister U’ilani “would read the letters to Manti” to help soothe his pain. "It's given me a sense of strength and perseverance," the Heisman Trophy finalist told the Sports Illustrated writer. 
 
 If Thamel or anyone else at SI had used Nexis or Google, they would’ve discovered that Lennay Kekua (not to mention her brother and sister) didn’t exist. A reporter doesn’t expect to learn that his subject's dead girlfriend is nothing but a fake Twitter avatar. But a reporter, especially at a fact-checked magazine like SI, also doesn’t generally put someone’s name into print and say that she smashed up her car on April 28 without confirming the spelling and the wreckage. That assumption of basic competence filters down to everyone else in the sports media ecosystem: If Manti Te’o’s story of woe is in Sports Illustrated, then it must be true. 
 
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 Manti Te’o was a sports hero, and his standout play this year demanded the details to flesh out that storyline. There’s a journalistic cliché: If your mother says she loves you, check it out. For sports hagiographers, it’s more like: If he makes a lot of tackles, don’t you dare check anything. Stardom demands that feature writers color in the lines with off-field greatness. And Te’o’s character, it seemed, was unimpeachable. After all, there had been all these stories about how humble and religious he was, and how he’d been led to Notre Dame to do something. 
 
 There must be sports villains to stand alongside the heroes, of course. That brings us to Pete Thamel’s other recent college football opus, and the other kind of confirmation bias. In the Oct. 22 issue of SI, Thamel and Thayer Evans wrote a cover story on Tyrann Mathieu called “Trials of the Honey Badger.” Mathieu, a 2011 Heisman Trophy finalist, was kicked off the LSU football team prior to the 2012 season, reportedly because he smoked marijuana. For the SI piece, Thamel and Evans went to Louisiana and performed the kind of dogged shoe-leather journalism that nobody bothered to do when reporting on Manti Te’o, humble Boy Scout. Their prize finding: Mathieu’s face appeared on a nightclub flyer, which might possibly constitute an NCAA violation. 
 
 In addition to playing the part of NCAA enforcers, Thamel and Evans want us to know that Mathieu is at a “crossroads.” “Three decades ago his father came to the same point,” they write, making a comparison that’s entirely unsupported by their reporting. The Honey Badger’s crime is smoking weed—he was arrested on marijuana possession charges after the SI piece came out—a practice that doesn’t land the typical college student on the cover of a national magazine. Mathieu’s father, by contrast, is in prison for killing a man. Thamel and Evans want us to believe, I guess, that Mathieu’s going to murder someone if he doesn’t straighten up. 
 
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 The Honey Badger, like Manti Te’o, is a cartoon character. But since Mathieu found himself on the sports world’s naughty list—troubled athlete, at the crossroads—he was the athlete who got a vetting more suited for a presidential candidate. 
 
 SI’s Mathieu and Te’o features both infantilize their subjects in their own way. In his Oct. 1 cover story, Thamel writes that Te’o has “linked the program’s glorious past with a promising future,” helping redeem Notre Dame from “the George O’Leary résumé fiasco, the death of student videographer Declan Sullivan in a tower collapse and the allegations of sexual misconduct lodged against a player by a St. Mary’s College student who committed suicide soon after.” 
 
 No matter what we learn about Te’o in the coming days, this black-and-white narrative—good man fixes bad things—enlightens no one and does the athlete no favors. 
 
 According to Notre Dame athletic director Jack Swarbrick, Te’o was the “perfect mark” for this fake girlfriend hoax, not its perpetrator. “He is a guy who is so willing to believe in others,” Swarbrick said at a press conference. 
 
 
 
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 Whether or not that’s true about Te’o, it’s an apt description of his chroniclers. Sports Illustrated looked at the linebacker and saw a classic template, not a human being who demanded the scantest thought or scrutiny. In the end, they got back the exact amount of effort they put in. This was journalism as fill-in-the-blank exercise, the creation of a simple story that tells you what you already know. In this case, what we already knew happened not to be the truth. If only Manti Te’o hadn’t been such a boy scout. Then we might have known how interesting he was all along. 
 
 Update, Jan. 16, 10:40 p.m.: ESPN's Gene Wojciechowski, who voiced a five-minute video feature on Te'o's tragic losses, says he was unable to find Lennay Kekua's obituary or documentation of her car accident. He didn't follow up, though, because the Notre Dame player "said the family would prefer not to be contacted" and "at that moment, you simply think that you have to respect those wishes." 
 
 Update, Jan. 17, 4:30 p.m.: In an interview with Dan Patrick, Sports Illustrated's Pete Thamel says he happened upon some "small red flags" while reporting his Manti Te'o cover story. Those red flags: no obituary, no death notice, no trace of Lennay Kekua in LexisNexis' public records search. Thamel says he passed along those holes to his editors, but convinced himself that Kekua's absence from LexisNexis wasn't necessarily significant because "sometimes when you're 20 and 21 you don't have a footprint." ||||| Ronaiah Tuiasosopo, the man who has been publicly identified as being behind the Manti Te'o girlfriend hoax, called a church friend in early December crying and admitted to duping the Heisman finalist, the friend told "Outside the Lines" Thursday. 
 
 The friend, a woman in her mid-20s, agreed to be interviewed under the condition that she not be identified, saying she was fearful for her family's safety because of the overwhelming publicity the story has generated. In the interview, she did allow for her voice to be recorded. 
 
 She said Tuiasosopo gave her the tearful confession and account of how he played what he said was at first a game on the unsuspecting Te'o. And, she said, he told her that it wasn't the first time he had done it. 
 
 "He (Ronaiah) told me that Manti was not involved at all, he was a victim. ... The girlfriend was a lie, the accident was a lie, the leukemia was a lie," said the woman. "He was crying, he was literally crying, he's like 'I know, I know what I have to do.' 
 
 "It's not only Manti, but he was telling me that it's a lot of other people they had done this to." 
 
 Notre Dame issued a news release Wednesday after Deadspin.com reported it could find no record of Lennay Kekua, Te'o's supposed girlfriend, existing. 
 
 Notre Dame athletic director Jack Swarbrick said in a news conference Wednesday night that coaches were informed by Te'o and his parents on Dec. 26 that Te'o had been the victim of what appeared to be a hoax. Someone using a fictitious name "apparently ingratiated herself" with Te'o, the school said, then conspired with others to lead him to believe she had died of leukemia. 
 
 Swarbrick said that the relationship took place online and over the phone. Te'o had described staying on the phone with whom he thought was Kekua for hours each night over many months. Tuiasosopo's friend from church told ESPN that Tuiasosopo admitted to having his female cousin speak to Te'o over the phone. 
 
 Te'o told Notre Dame officials that he received a phone call Dec. 6, while in attendance at an ESPN awards show in Orlando, from a number he recognized as having been that he associated with Kekua. The woman on the line during that phone call told Te'o she had to fake her own death in order to elude drug dealers, the Honolulu Star-Advertiser reports, citing a source close to Te'o's family. The woman then tried to restart her relationship with Te'o. 
 
 Te'o asked for a photo with a date stamp to verify her identity, the paper reports, but wasn't convinced and later went to his family and school officials to describe the hoax. 
 
 Meanwhile, on Friday, an adviser to Te'o told ESPN's Jeremy Schaap that the linebacker has been huddling Friday morning with family members and a team of advisers, who are trying to determine the best way for him to address the controversy. The adviser, who's been part of the discussions, also said that all of the advisers are thoroughly convinced that Te'o is telling the truth in saying that he was a victim of a hoax. 
 
 OTL also interviewed two other people who said they have a cousin who had the same online hoax pulled on them by Tuiasosopo.
– If Manti Te'o really was an innocent dupe, tricked into believing he had a girlfriend with a tragic story, he's going to have some explaining to do, reports the AP. Two holes in Te'o's story so far: Even though Te'o says he learned on Dec. 6 that "Lennay Kekua" never existed, he perpetuated the story at least twice after that in interviews. Te'o claimed to have met Kekua in person, including once in a September interview with Sports Illustrated. "We met just, ummmm, just she knew my cousin," he said of their first supposed encounter. "And kind of saw me there so. Just kind of regular." As for who "Lennay Kekua" really was, the New York Post reports that the woman seen in the fake Twitter account is Diane O’Meara, a 23-year-old marketing rep from California. “Somebody stole her identity,” a relative says. O'Meara is lawyered up and keeping quiet at the moment. "Te'o's story that he is completely innocent in this does not really ring true to us," said Timothy Burke, the Deadspin editor who co-wrote the original story, on CNN.