It's their job to make sure than anything that involves the team or player is throughly vetted. That's was their most important job, and they completely failed. For months, this dead grandma/dead gf story made international news. and no one bothered to ask Manti, prior to the story breaking, to clarity details before the SID cleared him for interviews. No one at ND can be this stupid, they intentionally rode this bullshit because it benefitted the institution. Stanford was involved, as well, because the supposed gf was enrolled at their school. They played their part, too.
What's amazing is that it took Deadspin almost no time to unravel the canard. It wasn't due to Pulitizer Prize investigative journalism. All they did was conduct basic background, ask who, shat, where, when, how, and why, and it all fell apart in less than a few hours. That was what the SID was supposed to have done, as well as NBC/ESPN. How the hell does ND claim they didn't sit down with Manti, ask him for background before they sent out press releases, and if they heard the same story that broke later, why didn't the adults say, "This is the stupidest fucking thing I've ever heard. We can't run this, they'll think we recruit morons," Manti isn't a moron, ND hung him out to dry...