While reporting his cover feature for Sports Illustrated on
Manti Te'o, Pete Thamel found what he called some "small red
flags" in the story of Lennay Kekua, the dead girlfriend who
never existed. So what did he do?  "You were able to write
around it," he said this morning on The Dan Patrick Show.
That's because everyone around Notre Dame had taken the dead
girlfriend as a given. Thamel said he had talked about Kekua
with a Notre Dame priest, Brian Kelly, and Te'o's teammates.
Thamel also said he had spoken about the girlfriend with Te'o
for 45 minutes. (Two sources tell us that SI.com will publish an
unedited transcript of the entire interview between Thamel and
Te'o later today.)  "By time I got to Manti Te'o on Sunday there
wasn't a whole lot of, 'Does she exist?' thinking in my head,"
he told Patrick.  So, Thamel went with what he got: She had an
April 28 car accident; she began to recover from the accident
two months later, and that's when doctors discovered she had
leukemia; her relatives told Te'o tha