So, I now join Deadspin in having spent entirely too much time thinking about this.
Here's my working theory so far, based largely on this unnamed source from a more recent deadspin post.
One source who knows both of them said the two "are intertwined."
Nilesh had a very methodical way of doing research to make a bet. Always talking about how he knew high end sports betters and would get advice. Sarah just bet on things Nilesh told her to bet on. He knew everything and did all of the "research." They are both very inteligent . Sarah is the sarcastic one and Nilesh is the very direct and analytical one. She may be writing some but Nilesh was always the leader.
They were always together even worked together at one time.
My guess is that Sarah Phillips is a real person, a 22 year old who grew up in Eugene and is currently attending OSU in Corvallis. I'm comfortable saying with absolute certainty that whoever controls her Twitter account is currently living in Oregon, because there was just WAY too much specific stuff about OSU and U of O throughout the football and basketball season. Sarah seems to have been a poster on the covers.com forums, and at some point was asked to write a column there. I never visited that site or read that column, so I can't say entirely.
If the source can be trusted that Nilesh was the more analytical/statistical mind and that Sarah was more of the sarcastic pop-culture style of writer, it would at least make sense that the ESPN column was probably co-written by both of them, with Nilesn providing the meat in the form of all the obscure statistics (her early columns were almost entirely reliant on things like "The Jets have won 14 of their last 18 games on grass following a loss") and Sarah probably spinned those up into an entertaining to read piece with a few Jersey Shore references thrown in for good measure and to sell that she was really a young woman (because that's what young women care about, right?
So, at some point this 22 year old college student who just a few months ago was just a message board poster is now finding herself a no-**** ESPN columnist. That's a completely ridiculous thing to happen and she was probably overwhelmed and reached out to her friend with superior knowledge to help her out. All of that makes perfect sense to me.
Now, as far as the scamming goes, that's where it gets tricky. It's possible that she was just young, immature, and stupid, and tried to completely take advantage of an amazing situation for a very short-term small gain (remember, this is a 22-year old college student we're talking about here). It's possible that her and Nilesh are some sort of ridiculous Internet hucksters who do this sort of thing all the time. Her defense (slightly less plausible) will probably be that Nilesh did all of the nefarious stuff on his own, having been given her passwords to all of her various accounts because he was a "trusted friend."
I think it's almost guaranteed that she'll be giving an interview to Deadspin sooner or later, once she has time to try and cover all of her tracks and put together a plausible narrative. Crazy shenanigans aside, "she" still has fans, 60k+ twitter followers, and name recognition (even if some of that is going to be negative). I don't think she just walks away from all of this and tries to live the rest of her life as some normal Psychology undergrad.
Should be interesting to see how it plays out.
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