Starting Five

2. FBI agent Fred Humphries appeared in the Seattle Times today, even though he works out of Tampa, because the photo of him below was sent to a Seattle Times reporter and other friends back in 2010. This is the “shirtless photo sent to Jill Kelley” we’ve heard so much about, but upon reading more,  we’re going to give Humphries the benefit of the doubt here that the photo is simply a self-effacing joke mixed with a sprinkle of pride about his physique. It’s a visual humblebrag. Also, the more we read about him, he appears to be a fairly principled dude, an idealist perhaps, who is willing to question authority if he believes in an issue. Careful, Fred. You may find yourself writing a blog soon.

2. Texas A&M freshman wide receiver Thomas Johnson, who had been missing since Monday, is found unharmed in Dallas three days later “with the help of Dallas police and the Texas Rangers.” We are anxious to hear what role Yu Darvish had in the discovery of Johnson, who actually had three catches for 22 yards in last Saturday’s upset of top-ranked Alabama. Johnson is third on the Aggies in receptions with 30. No word on why he disappeared or when he will return to the team.

3. Do Not Mess with the Zlatan. By now you must have seen the goal by Swedish national player Zlatan Ibrahimovic (his father is a Bosnian Muslim, his mother is Croatian, but he was born in Sweden) in last night’s match versus England. The goal, a rainbow bicycle kick from about 35 yards out, was described by the BBC as one that “combined unfathomable imagination and expert technique.” Ian Darke  referred to it as “simply fantastic.”

It was also the six-foot-five Ibrahimovic’s fourth goal of the match, which is at least equally astounding.

The most incredible part of this story? Zlatan’s goal in the inagural match in Stockholm’s Friends Arena came just hours after FIFA announced its candidates for the 10 Best Goals of 2012. This goal is thus ineligible for that prize.

4. Would it be fair to nickname Houston Rocket rookie Royce White the “Drive-By Shooter?” White, you may recall, has a fear of flying. He had yet to appear in a game this season but did accompany the team on its flight to the season opener in Detroit, before the Rockets shipped (bussed?) him off to the D-League. The question becomes, Is White’s fear of flying greater than his fear of not earning a healthy six-figure salary?

5. BP — British Petroleum — agrees to pay $4.5 billion in fines and penalties for the premier episode of The Newsroom for the 2011 explosion on the Deepwater Horizon and the resulting oil spill off the Louisiana coast. It may be the largest criminal penalty in U.S. history, although BP’s 3rd-quarter revenues were greater than that sum.

Reserves

We personally cannot wait until Barack Obama opens the fiscal cliff haggling process with “I am the president of the United States CLOTHED IN IMMENSE POWER!” POTUS, by the way, was scheduled to see a screening of the film tonight (Thursday ). Hopefully not at Ford’s Theater.

Christian Ponder: Man of Steele.

And now, a few words about Manti Te’o

Inspired by a morning round of tweets from yours truly

This week, full disclosure, I have been compiling a pile of data, anecdotes and other minutiae about Notre Dame linebacker Manti Te’o for Notre Dame’s sports information department. The project, for which I am being remunerated, has nothing to do — at least not from my end — about promoting Te’o for the Heisman Trophy, but rather its purpose is to educate Heisman voters who may be interested in learning more about Te’o.

I share that fact because deep down, unless a few extraordinary events take place the next two Saturdays, I don’t believe that Te’o will win the Heisman Trophy. And I certainly don’t believe anything that I will write will advance him any closer to doing so, although he may still tender an invite to New York City.

And yet, if you are a Notre Dame fan, or alumnus, this should not matter to you at all. Because what Manti Te’o has meant to Notre Dame over the past four-plus years (I return all the way to February 4, 2009, the day that he signed his national letter of intent) is beyond any bronze baubles. Allow me to re-type my tweets from this morning, which was more of a Twitter rant, actually:

“If I had to give Manti Te’o credit for any 1 thing, it’s that he brought sincerity and humility back to representing ND. The Clausen…

…and Tate era ended with them leaving a year early (fine) and an embarrassing presser in which an oversized illustration of the 2 of…

them served as a backdrop. It was a figurative black eye 4 program while Clausen still sported a real one. Te’o returned ideal that u..

go there inherently for its experience, not solely cuz HC has buddies in NFL Player personnel depts. ND lost its way for awhile. It took a…

Polynesian Mormon kid from North Shore of Oahu to set them straight. The Lord works in mysterious ways.

Many of my sportswriter pals would roll their eyes at me whenever I’d try to explain to ’em exactly what Te’o says every time he speaks.

The difference, of course, is that he has 417 career tackles and 6 more INTs than I do. Notre Dame, honestly, has never deserved the 100%…

Devotion Manti has given it. I sometimes think he gets the school, and its essence, better than most current administrators. But then, he…

did live in Dillon. Is he Heisman-worthy? I don’t care. But he did show, like the dude on library, the diff 1 person can make.

I don’t know how many hs seniors will come to ND b/c of Manti. I DO know that scores of 7-11 year-olds will end up there b/c of him.

Those were my tweets.

A few thoughts:

— I’ve never been anything but anabashedly proud that I am an alumnus of Notre Dame, and I have always endeavored to separate my love for my alma mater and my objective coverage of its football program. I’ll leave it to others to determine if I have succeeded.

— Manti Te’o arrived at a time when Notre Dame football was at its nadir, and that’s not just about the team’s record under former coach Charlie Weis. The program — and this is particularly troubling since the team was coached by an alumnus — had lost its way. Weis was selling kids an express route to the NFL whereas he should’ve been selling them the opportunity to be a part of the most storied program in college football history (as well as one of a very few handful of FBS schools ranked in the top 20 nationally academically).

— I attended Charlie Weis’ last press conference, his last game, and his last public appearance at Notre Dame, in which he sat between quarterback Jimmy Clausen and wide receiver Golden Tate when they publicly announced their decision to forgo their final season of eligibility. I don’t fault Tate or Clausen one bit for going pro, but I wonder whose idea it was to produce a backdrop, an over-the-top mural of both players that celebrated not the school but the individuals? And there was Weis, who had promised to attend but not to speak, sitting there between them.

Jimmy Clausen was a good, not great, college quarterback, but he never got Notre Dame. He never understood the experience. Which is too bad for him. Golden Tate was as fearless and often as miraculous a college wideout as I’ve ever seen, and I’ll never forget when he almost singlehandedly led the Irish back versus USC in 2009, his final season. His final touchdown catch of that game, in which he absorbed the best lick that USC headhunter Taylor Mays could lay on him and barely even flinched before tossing the ball to the ground somewhat nonchalantly, is vintage Tate. You wonder what a coach like Brian Kelly would do with Tate added to his arsenal.

— But both Clausen and Tate were just a little too savvy. A little too wise. A little too experienced and certainly in Clausen’s case, far too coy, to be representative of the student body. Te’o, if he had never played a down of football in South Bend, would typify the Notre Dame student that I knew. Now, sure, a lot of us had cheeky senses of humor, too (a la John Goodman, from what I can decipher on Twitter), but the sincerity you see on display by Te’o, the way he loves both the experience he is having at Notre Dame and the people he has met, is honest and undisguised.

— Through 21 games at Notre Dame, Manti Te’o had helped the Irish to no better than a 10-11 record. In the last two weeks of October, 2010, the Fighting Irish allowed Navy to score 35 points in an 18-point loss and then lost at home to Tulsa. In the interim student videographer Declan Sullivan died when the hydraulic lift he was standing on blew over due to wind gusts of greater than 50 m.p.h. Te’o, from what has been reported, was one of the first and one of the few players who ran through the break in the fence and actually saw Sullivan lying on the pavement in the final moments of his life.

— I remember that day well. I was there and arrived on the scene about 20 minutes after the tragedy took place. That night myself and a fellow reporter walked along the  South Quad, trying to obtain any information that we could about Sullivan from his friends and rector at Fisher Hall. It was an otherwise serene late October evening and as we walked past Dillon Hall, past the patio that sits on the front northwest corner of the dormitory, we saw a Hawaiian student strumming a ukelele. He was accompanied by a couple of other students. No one was talking. I’m pretty certain that the ukelele player was Kona Schwenke. I cannot recall whether or not Manti was among that group, but I try to imagine him that night, wondering what his college career was up to that point. He was playing for a sub-.500 team and this athlete who actually takes the time to learn the names of the Irish walk-ons had just witnessed the death of a fellow student who was part of the program.

— Since that horrible day Notre Dame is 22-5. Te’o has been the team’s unquestioned leader and more importantly than returning the Irish to the top 10, he has helped this university rediscover its identity. It is not an NFL proving ground. That is simply a corollary. There are numerous stories of how Te’o relates well to children, how he takes it upon himself to write a young cancer patient an email (and no one ever knows the better of it except that someone on the receiving end alerts the media). He is, for Notre Dame, not what SI called him — The Full Manti — but rather a Manti in full.

— As a boy I dreamt of attending Notre Dame. Loved the school. Worshipped Joe Montana and Kris Haines and Bob Crable and pretended to be them. Then I arrived as a freshman and my calculus professor spoke like Boris from the Underdog cartoons and there was this diabolical chemistry prof named Emil Hofman who made you take a quiz EVERY FRIDAY your entire freshman year. And the weather was the only thing colder than the girls.

But then, some time in the midst of my second semester, the place became home. And it has been ever since, even though I haven’t stepped foot on campus in more than two years. It will always be. I note all of this because I wonder if Manti had a similar experience. True, he was a USC fan as a kid but he obviously felt directed toward Notre Dame. Then there must have been a period of disillusionment, a battle of faith. Eventually, though, he cloaked himself in the essence of the school. There’s a story in The Observer, wonderfully written by Lauren Chval, in which the author notes that her little brother, also a Dillonite, had told her that Te’o had a habit of keeping his dorm room open and happily chatting up any freshmen who stopped by to see him in person. I can totally see that taking place. Tony Rice used to do the same thing 24 years ago when I was an R.A. in Dillon.

Anyway, this had dragged on far too long. Are you still reading? Manti Te’o arrived on campus amidst a period of darkness, of cynicism, of people fervently believing that simply being Notre Dame had no appeal to a demographic that wasn’t old enough to remember Lou Holtz or Chris Zorich. Arrived during a crisis of faith. But, simply through his actions, both on and off the field, his pureness of purpose and his uncompromising sincerity, he began to win converts. He gained a following. Opened eyes. Even people who detest Notre Dame have difficulty finding anything to dislike about Te’o. He launched a crusade simply by being true to himself.

You might even say he has been, in terms of the resurrection of this long middling program…messianic.