Report: Some At Notre Dame Wanted To Announce The Manti Te'o Hoax Last Week

Yahoo's Pat Forde is openly carrying water for the "Manti Te'o is a hapless victim" lobby at this point, but there's something fascinating at the top of his latest report: an assertion that the Notre Dame hoped to go public with the hoax last week, but that Te'o and his agent wanted to hold off.

Some administrators were pressing for a unilateral public disclosure by the school, while others wanted to let Te'o himself make the stunning news public, the source said. Notre Dame officials were in contact with Te'o's agent, Tom Condon of Creative Artists Agency, and were told the Heisman Trophy runner-up planned to release his version of events Monday. The decision was made to wait and let Te'o and CAA control the message.

But that disclosure never came, and instead the news broke in a bombshell report from Deadspin on Wednesday afternoon.

"Their plan was Monday," the source said. "In hindsight, we shouldn't have given them that time."

"A source" is vague, but it's pretty obviously coming from the Notre Dame camp. (As a general rule, your sportswriters have more connections with programs than they do with individual players.) There are two ways to look at this leak. First is damage control, an attempt to assure the public they they would have fessed up eventually, instead of hoping it went away without anyone looking further into it.

The second would be a clear indication Notre Dame is trying to distance itself from Manti Te'o. He's not ours anymore. He hired an agent. Anything he wanted to or wants to admit to the public, it's on him. Considering Notre Dame hasn't committed any violations, maybe distance is the university's new PR strategy.