“I can’t say that Im sorry for the things that we done…..At least for a little while sir me and her we had us some fun”– Bruce Springsteen, “Nebraska”

It was today in 1958 that 19-year old, James Dean obsessed Charles Starkweather drove to his 14-year old girlfriend’s house in Lincoln, Nebraska and when told to stay away from her, killed the mother, step-father and sister of Caril Ann Fugate.

After burying the bodies, the two went on to kill 10 more on a two month road trip that’s been covered by Springsteen and the movies “Kalifornia” and “Natural Born Killers.”

Today in 1979 the Pittsburgh Steelers became the first team to win three Super Bowls, beating the Dallas Cowboys 35-31. The game was a classic Super Bowl as both teams were trying to win their third Lombardi Trophy and were clearly the best two teams in the league. The Steelers got to the game by beating the Broncos 33-10 and the Oilers 34-5, while the Cowboys had beaten the Falcons 27-20 and the Rams 28-0.

The Golden Globes got it right today in 2001, when they awarded Best Musical or Comedy to “Almost Famous.” It wasn’t nominated for an Academy Award that year, and of the five (all pretty good) that were nominated, “Gladiator,” “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon,” “Erin Brockovich,” Chocolat,” and “Traffic,” I’d venture that almost anyone reading this would rather watch “Almost Famous.”  

It was at the same Globes that Sarah Jessica Parker defeated, among others, Calista Flockhart for Best Actress in a TV Comedy. 2001? Sex and the City and Ally McBeal? That sounds like 1993 doesn’t it?

Happy Birthday to Jack Nicklaus (73), Billy Ocean (63), and both Hakeem Olajuwon and Detlef Schrempf (50).

— Bill Hubbell

Admittedly, we were flummoxed. “Sup-Harbaugh-l?” “SuperBros?” “From Here to Fraternity?” We realize fans were already sick of the puns before Ray Lewis began spewing post-game non sequiturs (“…the up-and-down roller coaster that we went through was just an example of everything that we had to go through…” This only works if the Ravens had literally taken a roller coaster ride, which they had not). So, we went with Jimmy Johns, in the spirit of SI’s “How About Chick-Fil-A?” cover, and we are hoping to bring in some badly needed endorsement bucks so that we don’t have to lay off our Day of Yore writer. Anyway…

Starting Five

1. Forty-Niners and Ravens win to advance to the Super Bowl.

    A. First time in 16 years both road teams win the AFC and NFC conference championship games.

   B. Tom Brady loses with a halftime lead in Foxborough for the first time in his career (67-1).

  C. Both home teams (Atlanta, New England) not only lose but are shut out in the second half after leading at half time.

   D. Raven safety Bernard Pollard, more deleterious to Boston sports than both Magic Johnson and Bucky Dent combined? Has any single player ever inflicted so much pain on one franchise (don’t all jump up and yell “Alex Rodriguez!” at once)?Even before yesterday’s contest, he had earned the nom de guerre of Patriot Killer. Why?

 In 2008, as a Kansas City Chief, he ended quarterback Tom Brady’s season in the opener when he hit Senor Bundchen low on a safety blitz, tearing his ACL and MCL. The following season, as a Houston Texan, his tackle of Wes Welker resulted in an ACL and MCL tear. In last January’s AFC Championship Game he inflicted a high ankle sprain on Rob Gronkowski on a tackle, which limited Gronk in the Super Bowl. And yesterday he literally and figuratively delivered a knockout blow, hitting running back Steven Ridley head to head. Ridley pirouetted and fell as if he’d been KO’d, the ball falling from his grasp and landing in a Raven defender’s arms. It may not have been the game’s coup de grace, but certainly it was the pivotal play, helping to turn an 8-point lead into a 15-point lead.

Pollard (31) and Ridley both fell to the turf after this open-field collision

 You can almost, if you’d like, credit Pollard with robbing the Pats’ trophy case with at least one, if not two, Vince Lombardi trophies.

We might also mention that another Raven defender –Haloti Ngata– is responsible for all the misery that Robert Griffin III is undergoing. Clean hit, but it may have altered the future of RG3’s career.

F. Of all the comparisons you can make between ther 49ers and Ravens, this one is for us the most striking: these are easily the two hardest-hitting squads in the NFL. Super Bowl XLVII should be sponsored by Advil.

E. Tom Brady passed –in every sense — Brett Favre as the NFL’s all-time leader in playoff passing yards, while Joe Flacco became the first NFL quarterback to win six road games in the playoffs. It’s here that we love to remind you that Flacco transferred from Pittsburgh to Delaware because he could not beat out Tyler Palko. The DelMarVa area has been good to Flacco, and vice-versa.

2. It’s difficult to outdo the drama that Jimmy Chitwood and Norman Dale provided at Hinkle Field House a quarter-century ago, but credit Gonzaga and Butler (who both have done time as the Hickory High of the NCAA tournament in the past decade) for at least matching it. And for giving new meaning to the term “Final Four”, as in seconds.

Dick Vitale often uses the term “unbelievable”, but this truly was. Best finish of this season, of many seasons. If you haven’t seen it, Deadspin has everything that you require right here. There’s so much to love in these magical seconds, but how do you top Brad Stevens’ classic Anti-Valvano reaction to the shot? And, yes, earlier in the day Butler student Kevin Schwartz made his first halfcourt shot attempt on College Gameday to win $18,000.

More games from Hinkle, please. And less Final Fours from football domes. Thank you.

3. It hit us earlier this weekend, while listening to the opening chords and beats of a tune and misidentifying it. Listen to Foster the People’s “Pumped Up Kicks” from 2010. Now listen to the beginning of Love and Rockets’  “So Alive” from 1989.

4. Brooklyn Decker is running the Austin Marathon on February 17. So, line up early, spectators. The Austin Marathon is sponsored by the LIVESTRONG Foundation, by the way, whose founder (a man no longer associated with LIVESTRONG) is forbidden from taking part in it. 

Suddenly, the marathon is a spectator sport

5. If you have not been paying attention to the Northern Illinois men’s basketball team, that’s probably good for you. On Sunday the New York Times ran a story about how shooting in men’s college hoops has declined, and used the Huskies as a prime example. The NYT cited the December 1 NIU-Dayton contest in which the Huskies scored five first-half points, going 17 minutes and 15 shots without a bucket. The final was somewhat respectable, a 60-43 defeat.

So how did NIU respond to being called out nationally? Yesterday they amassed their lowest point total in 67 years, losing 71-34 to Western Michigan. The Huskies shot 20% from the floor and 50% from the free throw line. Someone in DeKalb should place a phone call to Kevin Schwartz.

Reserves

Notre Dame linebacker Manti Te’o made both the cold open and “Weekend Update” on Saturday Night Live. Deadspin’s expose on Te’o’s fauxmance with Lennay Kekua received more than 2.7 million hits, easily the most-viewed story in the site’s seven-plus years of existence. Losers? Notre Dame, Te’o and Rick Reilly’s August 16 column.

Over the weekend the South Bend Tribune ran a detailed story concerning the internal investigation that Notre Dame conducted after Te’o informed them of the hoax on December 26. Within the story it is revealed that the investigation was limited to electronic research and that “investigators did not interview Te’o or his family, nor did anyone attempt to contact Ronaiah Tuiasosopo or his relatives.”

Poorly played, Irish. To think that Te’o is the only “victim” in this mess is naive. Your school’s reputation has also suffered some damage. You owe it to yourselves to fully investigate Te’o’s phone records, etc., even though no crime has been committed. If you want to fully exonerate Te’o, and by association, yourselves, this needs to happen.

****

There’s a cross-country bicycle race, the Race Across America (RAAM), in which there are no stages. It starts at the Pacific Ocean and ends at the Atlantic, and takes place each June. RAAM does do drug-testing, so we assume that Lance Armstrong is also banned from that race, but we are still looking into it. We just can’t imagine Armstrong won’t search far and wide to find an endurance race of some sort (mud runs? Warrior Dash?) in which he can compete. It’s what keeps his heart beating, after all (and, no, we do not feel sorry for him).

And, for the record, Armstrong has pondered competing in RAAM in the past. And just three years ago RAAM’s CEO, a cancer survivor, called Lance and RAAM “a perfect fit.” Now? We’ll see.

Starting Five

1. “I look at that (tape) and I go, ‘Look at this arrogant prick’ “…

      You, too, Lance?

      “I went and looked up the definition of ‘cheat’,” Lance tells Oprah who, in our scorecards, pitched a terrific first inning and from then on was mostly unable to find the plate. “The definition of cheat is ‘to gain an advantage on a rival or foe..”

     CHALLENGE FLAG!

       First of all, Mr. Armstrong, we looked up the defnition on Dictionary.com as well as Merriam-Webster Online and the closest one that covers sport reads simply “to violate rules dishonestly”, which you did. Chronically. Also, that definition would serve as the prefix to the one you provided: “to violate rules dishonestly to gain an advantage on a rival or foe…”

      There. Now it works. And too bad for Oprah that she wasn’t sharp enough to challenge him on that. On a lot of things he said.

         There are so many people in the business (Bob Costas, Jeremy Schaap, Bob Ley, Anderson Cooper, Bizarro World Joe Posnanski) who would have done a better job with this.

        Watching, we got the feeling that Lance views this epic fall from grace as nothing more than a flat tire in the midst of a tour, and that appearing with Oprah would be the patch that will allow him to return to the peloton. He still doesn’t get it.

“I never called her fat, Oprah. But you…you could lose a few pounds. You know?”

      “To be honest, Oprah, we sued so many people…” Now that was funny.

       So was, “I never called you fat.” Oh, brother.

      Actually, everything Lance may have thought he did to come clean over these 2 1/2 hours is undone simply by the fact that he refused to answer the question as to whether Betsy Andreu was telling the truth about what she overheard in the hospital. “I’m not going to take that on. I’m laying down on that one.”

Why? Because he’d be perjuring himself and that would cost $$$. Again, why did Oprah let him off the hook at that moment? “Why, Lance, why won’t you answer that question? If this is your moment to confess to America, what are your motives for not answering that?”

In fact, strike my previous statement about the best people to interview Lance. I have an old friend, a high school chum and a Stanford alumnus (an actual Stanford alumnus, not a Lennay Kekua-style Stanford alum) who is an attorney in Phoenix. Name: Michael DePaoli. One of the sharpest minds I know (but he’s not as cute as me, and this absolutely KILLS him). He’s the best interrogator I have ever met. If I had a chance to interview Lance, if anyone did, I’d put him up there against my old friend Michael. Now THAT would be utterly compelling television.

     There were so many disturbing moments over the 90 minutes. That one. Or the fact that apparently there’s a show called “Staten Island Law.” As for us, we just think the entire interview was a launch pad for Lance to become a permanent guest on “Iyanla: Fix My Life.”

       While we wait for that, read Bonnie D. Ford’s column from ESPN.com

2. It was a bad night for people who wear yellow jerseys (okay, we stole that from someone on Twitter…we can’t remember whom…we’ve stolen from so many people, Oprah)

Just as Lance and Oprah were finishing up The Confessional, Part I, the Miami Heat and Los Angeles Lakers were tipping off at Staples Center. The Heat were playing their third game in four nights, all on the road out west, and yet it was clear that the Lakers are not in their class. Earlier in the day ESPN’s Shelley Smith had said that these were the two teams “that everyone wants to see (in the NBA Finals) in June”, but that’s only half-correct. The Lakers may have more NBA MVPs on its roster (two; the Heat DO have two SI Sportsman of the Year), but they are not at all a cohesive team. There’s a good reason they’re in 11th place in the Western Conference: They belong there.

3. This report tells us what? That Yahoo!Sports’ Pat Forde spoke to either (we’re assuming here, but we feel reasonably comfortable about it) Notre Dame associate athletic director John Heisler or Sports Information Director Brian Hardin (all three men here are upstanding individuals who would never call someone fat, much less take EPO), who wanted it known that Notre Dame was eager to get the No Such Dame story out before the media did.

The lesson in this for the Irish: Trust your instinct and do what you know is right. The moment you realized that Manti Te’o had learned of the deception (and again, we are giving Te’o the benefit of the doubt for the moment) but that he still sold the story — for example, when he spoke to ESPN’s Chris Fowler at the Heisman ceremony — is the moment you realize that you no longer own Manti any courtesies on the topic.

As an aside, may I just say that it is exhausting telling people how they should be doing their jobs in the media. Especially when I don’t have one. Moving on…

4. We like Pete Thamel and the few times we’ve spent with him in person (which, as we now know, is better than saying you’ve “met” someone) have always enjoyed his company. Admire his reporting skills, particularly from his New York Times days.

Yesterday he appeared on the Dan Patrick Show (no great risk, since both are employed by Sports Illustrated) and released the transcript of his interview, the most salient parts of which are reproduced here.

Our analysis: The interview shows a reporter who is conscientiously digging for the truth, for something of substance. He sees too much opaqueness in Teo’s replies. But it is Sunday night. Manti Te’o is the most charismatic figure in sports and Thamel’s magazine wants to put him on the cover (at least, regionally) and there is a story to write. And fact-check.

I have PLENTY of experience walking into the doors of Sports Illustrated on a Monday morning, knowing that the magazine closes that night, and being the person who must fact-check the story that just arrived minutes ago. There are a series of editors (original edit, red pencil, blue pencil, copydesk, late read) that will look at the piece, some adding their own (often valid) questions that only add to one’s fact-checking work load. Imagine, for example, that you spend 45 minutes on the phone with a source and then an editor conjures a new question that only that source can answer, but you may not be able to get in touch with him or her again. That’s just one headache.

Anyway, the point is this: the editors pay tremendous lip service to having the story checked as accurately as possible, and they even may mean it, but the time constraints involved and the pressure to have that story in the magazine far outweigh it. Do you think a 24 year-old fact-checker is in real life going to tell Ben Fong-Torres (sorry, had to go with the Almost Famous ref) that Thamel’s story doesn’t add up (when at best they just cannot confirm whether or not it’s true) and force the higher-ups — the very people who may determine that fact-checker’s future at  the magazine — to come up with another cover story? Or toss out the entire Lennay Kekua angle?

Rigggggghhhhht.

Those who want to blame Thamel for not verifying all the facts himself don’t understand the process. It’s Thamel’s job to find the stories, to do the reporting. While it’s fantastic if he can provide the fact-checker with what we call “red checks”, it’s not incumbent upon him to do so (the best writers at SI for doing this are always the ones who, like Thamel, come from newspapers; they’re used to fact-checking their own stuff; for the record, and this will not surprise you, Tim Layden and Tom Verducci were the most reliable when I was there, and Rick Reilly, God bless him, the least). To summarize: it’s not Thamel’s responsibility to fact-check everything he discovers.

But it’s just unfair, sometimes, to give a reporter one day to fact-check a story while during that entire day the story is “moving through the (editorial) system”  with the implicit expectation that it must close that night. The reporter/fact-checker has the least leverage at the magazine and yet he/she is the one who bears the responsibility of having to tell someone, “You know what? We just don’t have this solid. We should wait.”

Sure, that’s going to happen. And the galley chef is going to tell the captain of the Titanic that maybe they should slow down a bit on this moonless, waveless night. The attitude of the Managing Editor and the Assistant Managing Editors, and perhaps even the Senior Editor, is simply: I don’t care how you fact-check the story, I just want it done. ‘Can’t’ is not an option.”

To repeat: may I just say that it is exhausting telling people how they should be doing their jobs in the media. Especially when I don’t have one.

5. You still want a No. 5 after all of that? Why, you ungrateful bastards! As the eponymous sheriff of Hope Springs told the villains, “You…..get…outta….here!”

Okay, okay. You want something? Well, to counteract all of the news about Lance, who is a native Texan and still holes up in Austin, here’s 50 Reasons Why Texas is the Best State in America (don’t laugh). Now, you get outta here!

So as it turns out this was not the only fraudulent college football cover that Sports Illustrated produced last autumn. As we learned yesterday, so was this one. The Full Manti? Anything but.

But why single out SI? We are all to blame for not doing our jobs assiduously enough. ESPN, for airing the College Gameday interview with Gene Wojciechowski. Every reporter on the Notre Dame beat, for never questioning how come no single photo of Manti Te’o and his presumed deceased girlfriend together did not exist, for never pressing for a single anecdote about the time they spent in one another’s actual presence. Myself, for writing, at the behest of Notre Dame’s athletic department, an “Everything You Need To Know About Manti Te’o” story for its website in which I regurgitated the same falsehoods.

The background on my own involvement. In the last week of October, Notre Dame associate athletic director John Heisler phoned me and asked me to write the piece for UND.com. The idea was that writers who were interested in doing features on Te’o leading up to the Heisman Trophy would have a resource for combing through material, anecdotes, stats, etc. The result was this piece, Manti Teo: the Notre Dame Linebacker Unplugged.

I understood that this was not objective journalism, and as I am not presently employed in that field, I had no qualms with doing it (for the record, John never mentioned my fee for this project and I never asked; in fact, I still have yet to be paid. Hello, John?). I later asked, via email, if I might speak to Manti or any members of his family but Heisler never replied to that email. The deadline was roughly one week.

Obviously, the story of Lennay Kekula intrigued me and so I searched for other stories to find more vivid details. How did they meet? Where did she live? If she was not from Hawaii, how often did they see one another? Where was she buried? And how did Manti Te’o know, as the story that I had worked off reported (and I trust this writer implicitly, not to mention that he’s a damn good reporter), that her casket was due to be closed at exactly 9:01 a.m. That is a precise and  meticulous –and bizarre — detail, just the type I’d want to investigate further.

But I never was able to speak to Manti. And never, neither on Google or Nexis, did I ever find corroborating information besides those original stories. And this is where I failed: I accepted those stories as truth. It never even occurred to me that this might be a hoax. And that is all on me.

Last Saturday Tim Burke of Deadspin emailed me about the 9:01 a.m anecdote and my antennae shot up. Burke did not tell me exactly what he was searching for –nor did he owe me that — but I relayed to him pretty much what I’ve just told you. After I emailed Burke, I Googled my Manti Te’o story, which I probably had not viewed since November.

Guess what? The anecdote that I had included about Lennay, the one in which Manti asks defensive coordinator Bob Diaco during the walk-through before the Sept. 22 Michigan game what time it is (“12:01” eastern time) and realizes that it is the exact time that Lennay’s casket is being closed, that anecdote was no longer part of the piece. And this was last Saturday. Someone associated with Notre Dame had deleted it before Deadspin’s story broke.

Again, why did I fail to deduce that something was awry? Why did we all? Maybe we were all as gullible as Manti — that is, if you believe Manti Te’o. But who knows what to believe?

Starting Five

1. Keyser Soze. Captain Tuttle. Alan Smithee. Anthony Godby Johnson. And now, Lennay Kekua. People who were presumed to exist but in fact did not (your references, in order: The Usual Suspects, M*A*S*H, Hollywood, and the book “Between A Rock and A Hard Place”, the last of which completely duped Keith Olberman back in the 1990s, who spoke with him often on the phone).

Anyway, kudos to Deadspin for breaking the story of the year, one that was hiding in plain sight all season long. How complicit was Manti Te’o in this hoax? Until Te’o speaks publicly –and perhaps even after — the answer to that question may hinge on your preconceived notions about Notre Dame. One thing is for certain: The quarterback at Alabama dates Miss Alabama, and the premier player for the Fighting Irish dated a charade who then died (only to be resurrected on December 6…now where have we heard that before?)

Questions that need to be answered: Who tipped off Deadspin? What was their motive? Why didn’t anyone ask Te’o about the last time he had seen Kekua in person, and why did Te’o imply –multiple times — that they had? Who will be the first reporter to get in contact with Ronaiah Tuiasosopo?

This is Lennay Kekula, and we are all Chazz Palmientiri

2. Birds, but not of a feather. Chip Kelly is moving from the Ducks of Nike State Oregon to the Eagles of Philadelphia. Kelly’s Ducks went 36-4 over the past three seasons, the best record in college football. He also revolutionized the way offense is run in college, which has since spilled over into the way it is run in the NFL. Kelly becomes the third Pac-12 coach in the past four years to take up residence on an NFL sideline, following in the shoes of Pete Carroll and Jim Harbaugh, both of whom have been successful (unlike that Nick Saban clown; what ever became ofhim?)

3. Screamliner. Boeing grounds its 787 Dreamliner and also forbids it to watch television or go on-line for one week.

4. Islamists in Algeria take more than a dozen Westerners, including at least a few Americans, hostage at an Algerian oil field (this sounds like a great story for Kaj Larsen! Oh, well). The question becomes whether we go with the “Canadian film crew” ruse again or if we just send Ben Affleck and a bunch of hoods from Southie in to rough up the hostage takers. What are the Savage brothers doing these days, anyhow?

5. Is Elin going to give Tiger a mulligan? The National Enquirer –don’t scoff, they’ve been ahead of the curve on much of the Tiger scandal — reports that Woods wants to remarry Elin, that they’ve hooked up recently, and that she is demanding a $350 million “anti-cheating clause” if they do indeed re-tie the knot (am I not the only one thinking that Elin is dumb-blonde like a fox?). What should you love about this? Tiger has won 14 majors in his career but not a single one since 2008, since before the marriage blew up in his face. Wouldn’t it be funny if Jack Nicklaus (a record 18 majors) began phoning Elin and advising her that remarrying Tiger is a horrible idea?

“Get back, get back, get back to where you once belonged…”

Reserves

Scores and scores of Subway sandwich customers are posting photos that illustrate that their foot-long subs are actually not as long as advertised. It just proves that Subway is run by men.

“The Market Wants Apple To Unveil a Time Machine“. Author Dan Pallotta points out that investors who are dissatisfied with Apple have very short memories and unrealistic expectations. Pallotta reminds all those who have criticized Tim Cook, the successor to Steve Jobs, that it was four years from the time that Jobs returned to Apple until the iPod was introduced. And that it was another six years between the iPod and the iPhone. Meanwhile, Cook has been on the job about 15 months. Now, about that Time Machine, what colors does it come in?

More Manti Thoughts… (free-association time)

The week in a nutshell: Jodie Foster and Manti Te’o…single.

If don’t understand how someone can be intelligent enough to graduate from a Top 20 university and basically quarterback the team’s defense and yet still be clueless enough to think he was in a relationship with a woman he’d never met in person, then you’ve never spent any time in a men’s dorm at Notre Dame.

Alabama: Katherine Webb. Notre Dame: Lennay Kekua. Advantage: Crimson Tide.

(On that note, and there’s no question that Alabama was the superior team and not by just a little bit, but how much did this secret weigh on Te’o during his time in Miami? How much did it affect his performance, which was certainly underwhelming?)

Great job, Deadspin. On the other hand, you run the story after claiming that you were unable to contact Te’o’s father because he was “in a meeting.” How long was that meeting, exactly?

As always, Jason Gay of the WSJ had a great line: “Just read the Deadspin piece. Let me get this straight: Notre Dame was invited to play for the national championship?”