In college football, fans arent unfamiliar with how any player’s better halves really live up that name, pushing them to great heights. You name them – Travis Hunter’s fiancée Leanna Lenee, Riley Leonard’s girlfriend Molly Walding, Garrett Nussmeier’s sweetheart Ella Springfield. But guess what? This is just one side of the coin…
If we take down our rose-tinted glasses, we get to see how college football stars have struggled with their personal lives, too. The recent example being the Miami Hurricanes quarterback Carson Beck and his love life hitting sour notes with Miami women’s basketball player, Hanna Cavinder. It’s time for CFB fans to travel back in time. There was this one Heisman runner-up whose football career came to a halt because of an online hoax.
There has been more or less a common plot in the love stories of college football players. For instance, Hunter pampering Lenee with luxury gifts, and Lenee doing the same. Then Leonard came up with a boyfriend goal by making a 1,332-mile round trip to be a part of Walding’s special day at Auburn University. In all these cases, there have been two lovers. But in the case of 2012 Heisman Trophy runners-up, Manti Te’o, the ladylove went missing.
It was all but a hoax, a made-up scenario. However, it came off as the biggest surprise, which crushed Te’o’s NFL aspirations. The Notre Dame linebacker lifted the second prize at the 2012 Heisman Trophy ceremony at the Best Buy Theater in New York City. Te’o was the third defense-only player to finish in the top two of the Heisman Trophy balloting and the first since Pittsburgh defensive end Hugh Green in 1980.
Before that, he had the Nagurski Trophy, Butkus Award, Lombardi Award, Bednarik Award, Maxwell Award, and Walter Camp Player of the Year under his belt. Making it to the Heisman stage, Te’o broke Notre Dame’s Heisman drought since quarterback Brady Quinn in 2006. He had been the leader of an Irish defense that ranked first nationally by allowing just 10.3 points per game. The senior has 103 tackles and seven interceptions. So, Te’o seemed destined to become a first-round pick in the 2013 NFL draft. But his love life became the antagonist. He claimed that his girlfriend, Lennay Kekua, and his grandmom had died on the same day in December 2012. On May 9, MLF Football tweeted a TikTok video of what followed next.
HEARTBREAKING: Lennay Kekua ruined Manti Te’o’s career… he would’ve had a chance to be one of the all-time great #NFL linebackers.
Te’o was 2nd in the Heisman Trophy voting as a linebacker — an unheard of feat.
A heartbreaking and tragic story…pic.twitter.com/ubxf7lGDmX
— MLFootball (@_MLFootball) May 10, 2025
In January 2013, a problem became international news: Te’o’s girlfriend, Lennay Kekua, was not real. With further investigations, it came out, Kekua, who purported to be a student at Stanford and with whom Te’o had pursued a purely online relationship, was a Facebook creation. So, Pat McAfee still holds the regret. He called the impersonator “One of the worst humans of all time,” and said, “Manti Te’o deserves a massive apology for that.”
In 2022, Netflix released a special documentary, “Untold: The Girlfriend Who Didn’t Exist.” There, the supposed Kekua, who is Naya Tuiasosopo, a now-transgender woman, confessed that she created Kekua to escape from her tortured reality. But by then, Te’o had already turned into a laughing stock. “He dedicated his season to them. It was an amazing story. One problem, his girlfriend did not exist,” said the Netflix series narrator.
With no fault of his own, Te’o had to face a dark future. The TikTok video also had an old clip of the then-Notre Dame athletic director, Jack Swarbrick. “The thing I am most sad of, the single most trusting human being I ever met. Will never be able to trust in the same way again in his life. That’s an incredible tragedy.” However, Te’o took life’s challenges as they came, very sportingly.
A new chapter unfolded for Manti Te’o
True, Manti Te’o’s NFL dreams did not come true. But that couldn’t stop him. He was selected by the San Diego Chargers in the second round of the 2013 NFL draft as the 38th overall pick and played in the NFL until 2021. He is now living his NFL dreams, but not on the gridiron, but rather in front of the camera. The former Notre Dame star, who is a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, joined NFL Network as an analyst in August last year. Te’o joined the former Washington head coach, Ron Rivera, whom the Commanders fired. Along with former receiver Isaiah Stanback and Nate Tice of Yahoo Sports.
Is he pestering about how his life took a surprising turn? Not at all. Rather, he laughed at it. In his first appearance, Te’o playfully quipped, “I haven’t Googled myself since 2013, for obvious reasons.” Now that he had taken up the analyst role, he thought of contributing to the young chaps who were taking the giant leap.
He addressed the struggles on the Pat McAfee Show. “The way I played with the Chargers my first three years, I didn’t play good football at all. It was totally different than the player everyone saw at Notre Dame… I was in no shape mentally and emotionally to play in the NFL.” If resilience had a face, it’d be Manti Te’o—he took life’s hits and came back swinging.
The post CFB Analysts Reflect on Heisman Runner-Up’s Downfall as Online Hoax Crushed His NFL Career appeared first on EssentiallySports.
