Just halfway through January, and we already have a winner for the weirdest story of the year.

Notre Dame linebacker, Mantei Teo, famously lost his girlfriend to leukemia earlier this year.

Teo's supposed girlfriend never existed.

That's right, there was no woman by that name.

It was a story that stunned the sports world like no other.

In 2012, Manteo had led Notre Dame to an undefeated regular season,

been named defensive player of the year, was the Heisman Trophy runner-up, all while supposedly

reeling from the death of his girlfriend, a girlfriend who, it turned out, had never existed.

Today, ESPN's Don Van Nata brings us the backstory of how the Teao hoax unfolded.

And why so many of us got fooled.

I'm Pablo Torre. It's Tuesday, January 5th.

This is ESPN Daily.

So, Don, the newest episode of Backstory, your investigative docu-series for ESPN, focuses on the tale of Mantai Teo, who is, on the one hand, this college football phenomenon who led Notre Dame to an

undefeated regular season back in 2012. That is true. But he is more infamously remembered by

sports fans for being catfished. It was reported, confirmed that Teo's girlfriend,

his then-girlfriend, who he claimed had died of cancer, was actually not a real person.

And so, Don, this is just one of the strangest sports stories of the last decade, I would contend, ever, actually.

So what made you want to revisit the story of Mantei Teo for backstory?

Because all these years later, there's so many questions that have lingered.

Don Van Nata is a Pulitzer Prize winning reporter and the host of the ESPN docu

series, Backstory.

Remember, we all bought into this incredible fable, and that's the word for it.

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