Yahoo!: Te'o Passed on Releasing Story

Yahoo's Pat Forde posted an article not long ago adding some more details to this bizarre situation.

His sources say there was an internal debate between administrators at Notre Dame, Te'o, Te'o's family, and Te'o's agent on whether to make the story public following the BCS Title Game.

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 Wednesday afternoon.

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

Despite Te'o waiting, Notre Dame was convinced it would become public eventually.

"There was never a belief in any quarter that it wouldn't get told," the source said.

Yahoo's article goes on to further clarify the events that unfolded back in December.

The hoax started coming to light in early December, according to sources.

On Dec. 7, while attending the ESPN college football awards show in Orlando, Notre Dame athletic director Jack Swarbrick said Te'o got a call from the phone number he had associated with Kekua. Te'o was deeply disturbed by the call and suspected it was Kekua's purported sister. Although Te'o's parents were with him in Orlando, he did not inform them of the call, a source said.

The person kept calling and saying it was Lennay herself, and over the course of 10 days Te'o engaged the woman in several conversations.

"He was asking questions only Lennay would know," said the source, adding that phone records show multiple calls between Te'o and that number.

By the time first-semester classes were over at Notre Dame, Te'o was convinced Lennay Kekua was a hoax, the source said. He went home to Hawaii for Christmas and told his mother about it on Christmas Eve. The day after Christmas, he informed defensive coordinator Bob Diaco, head coach Brian Kelly and athletic director Jack Swarbrick. Upon returning to campus, Te'o met with Notre Dame officials on Dec. 27 and told them he had never met his girlfriend.

That Te'o did not meet his girlfriend in person runs contradictory to earlier statements made by him and his father. The source from Yahoo! said:

"That's pretty much Brian Te'o. He's a great guy, but he loves to add color."

The last bit of the article is from Notre Dame Athletic Director Jack Swarbrick's press conference as it relates to the timetable the Te'o family was working on.

"While apprised by that investigative firm of their work along the way, we received a final report from them on January 4th," Swarbrick said in his press conference Wednesday night. "I met with Brian and Ottilia Te'o in Miami on the 5th to share with them the essence of those findings. We left that meeting with an understanding that they would think about what they had heard, engaged Manti's future representation, which would be determined later in the week, in consultation as to how to best respond, and keep the university fully informed of their intentions and work in concert with us when they were ready to communicate the story.

"It was my understanding - is my understanding that they were on a timetable to release the story themselves next week when today's story broke."