Manti Te'o is officially joining the NFL Network for the 2024 season. Credit: NFL Network
By Sam Neumann on

There is a clock somewhere, still ticking, still measuring the distance between who Manti Te’o was on the night of Jan. 7, 2013, and who he is now.

That night, Alabama dismantled Notre Dame 42-14 in the BCS National Championship in Miami, and Te’o finished with 10 tackles in a game that never had a chance to be about football. The country had already decided what it was about. A week later, Deadspin would publish the story that split his life in two: the girlfriend was a fiction. Lennay Kekua had never existed. The woman Te’o had publicly mourned — the woman whose death, on the same September morning as his grandmother’s, he had channeled into one of the most decorated defensive seasons in college football history — had been constructed by someone else, without his knowledge, and used to hollow out the most public year of his life.

There is a version of Te’o’s story that ends somewhere completely different — quietly, bitterly, in the long shadow of a scandal that wasn’t entirely his fault — but still managed to reshape how an entire generation understood his name. It was a lot to ask of anyone. It was an impossible amount to ask of a 21-year-old kid from Laie, Hawaii.

That version isn’t the one we’re watching.

The one we’re watching has Manti Te’o, now a rising star in sports media, sitting on the set of Good Morning Football every morning, next to Kyle Brandt — the last surviving original — helping carry one of football media’s most beloved institutions into whatever era comes next.

When GMFB launched in 2016, it arrived as something close to a gift: an NFL Network morning program with genuine personality, a cast that crackled with chemistry, and a format loose enough to let real human beings be real human beings on television. The original lineup of Kay Adams, Peter Schrager, Kyle Brandt, and Nate Burleson didn’t feel like a television show so much as it felt like the best sports bar conversation you’d stumbled into before 10 a.m.

It became, for a certain kind of football fan, as essential as coffee.

Then came the erosion. Burleson left in 2022 for CBS Mornings, chasing something bigger. Adams departed around the same time to launch her own show, and Jamie Erdahl stepped into the hosting chair with grace and competence, but the original alchemy was irreplaceable. Schrager stayed on through the disruptive relocation from New York to Los Angeles in 2024 before eventually telling SI Media’s Jimmy Traina what the move had cost him. “I don’t have anything left to give that show,” he said, and he meant it with love, and he left for ESPN. Jason McCourty came and went. Akbar Gbajabiamila came and went faster.

Every transition created a new hole in the living room that GMFB had built for a decade. Every exit left a new question: what is Good Morning Football now, exactly, when the thing that made it Good Morning Football keeps walking out the door?

Into that question walked Manti Te’o.

Manti Te’o was a projected first-round pick who watched the entire first round of the 2013 NFL Draft pass from his family’s home in Hawaii without hearing his name called. The Deadspin story had done its work. The Chargers eventually traded up to take him 38th overall, and Te’o spent the next eight seasons — with San Diego, New Orleans, and Chicago — building a professional career that the rest of the country had largely decided not to pay attention to.

He retired in 2020 with little fanfare and spent a few years outside the spotlight before the 2022 Netflix documentary Untold: The Girlfriend Who Didn’t Exist reopened everything — the grief, the manipulation, the public humiliation — and invited a generation that had only half-remembered the story to sit with its full weight.

What they found while watching that documentary was not the punchline they had been handed a decade earlier. They found a person. That person was the one the NFL Network put in front of a camera. Angela Ellis, the network’s vice president of original content and entertainment, had been watching closely — and earlier than most.

“Manti was a standout at our Broadcast and Media Workshop in 2024 for players developing their on-camera skills,” Ellis told Awful Announcing. “There is something special about the energy he brings into any room, and that, paired with his experience on the field and rapport with players and coaches, makes him a truly unique talent that we were excited to help cultivate.”

What that looks like in practice has revealed itself in moments both big and small. In his very first week on the GMFB set in August 2024, Kyle Brandt ran a trivia segment to test whether Te’o could recall his college tackle totals. Te’o admitted he had no idea. The reason, he explained, was that he hadn’t googled himself since 2013.

“For obvious reasons,” he said, and let the room do the rest.

The lighter moments are one thing. What happened in September 2024 is another. When Tua Tagovailoa went down against the Bills on a Thursday night, Te’o sat on the GMFB set the next morning and tried to find the words for what he was feeling about a man he has called his little brother, a man he has known since Tua was a kid growing up in the same Hawaiian football world Te’o came from. The words didn’t come all the way. And then he kept going anyway, talking about what a concussion feels like from the inside, about walking off a field and not knowing you’re walking, about daughters and aisles and being 45 years old and still thinking clearly, about the life that exists beyond every snap and why that life is the only thing that actually matters.

Manti Te’o made it uncomfortable. He made it human. He made the audience feel the weight of what it means to watch someone you love get hurt doing something you both gave your bodies to, and to not know, standing there in a television studio in Los Angeles at six in the morning, whether he’s going to be okay.

That willingness to just be honest is what makes him worth listening to when the topic is considerably lighter.

Good Morning Football has always been defined by the authenticity of its cast. If anything, the reason the Adams-Schrager-Brandt-Burleson era resonated so deeply was that it felt like people who genuinely liked each other were talking about something they genuinely cared about. The show lost that quality for a while as the turnover accelerated.

Good Morning Football found one in a 36-year-old from Laie, Hawaii, who had more reasons than most people to close himself off from the world and chose instead to open up about it.

The clock is still ticking. But it’s measuring something different now.

About Sam Neumann

Since the beginning of 2023, Sam has been a staff writer for Awful Announcing and The Comeback. A 2021 graduate of Temple University, Sam is a Charlotte native, who currently calls Greenville, South Carolina his home. He also has a love/hate relationship with the New York Mets and Jets.

View all posts by Sam Neumann