and left out key details that would have exposed that despite being “cat-fished” he still deliberately lied on several occasions which brought to him significant media coverage and made him a Heisman candidate when objectively he had no business being there at all.
He had an entire stadium mourn his fake girlfriend with him for crying out loud — if it weren’t so sad and strange, it is off the charts level of comedy.
Sure, it’s plausible that he didn’t know he was being played but he still told reporters that she went to Hawaii with him to meet his parents. He told reporters of the time that he met her after the Stanford game where they locked eyes. He embellished several other key details — it was absolutely insane.
Lots of people meet people over the phone and get to know them from a distance but nobody takes these sorts of flimsy at best “relationships” and then plays them up in the media without actually verifying the person is real and without having a real relationship with them.