Explain the Fake High School to Me Like I'm Five
A brief, "Midnight Audible" primer on the catfish of high school football.
If you have been on the internet at any point in time within the past 48-72 hours, you may have heard about Bishop Sycamore High School, an alleged “football” “powerhouse” that played on national television on Sunday. The “team” got shut out by IMG Academy, a prep school mainly known as a feeder for young, star athletes into Division I sports programs more than it’s known for being, well, a high school.
A “high school football team” like Bishop Sycamore’s is not the first to get blown out, and surely will not be the last, but all of that is beside the point. If you weren’t catching my drift earlier, dear reader, there is a very good chance Bishop Sycamore is not a real school at all. Not in the way that IMG is functionally an athlete-feeder that also provides its students an education, but more along the lines of, say, if Fyre Festival were a school.
While the story keeps unraveling, and not all the details have come to light, I’m going to try to round up some of the excellent reporting1 done on this and let you dive into the rabbit hole yourself.
What is Bishop Sycamore?
Bishop Sycamore is, apparently, an “online charter school” in Ohio with a make-believe football team. Previously known as COF Academy, Bishop Sycamore is not a member of the Ohio High School Athletics Association (OHSAA), which is the governing body of Ohio high school sports, though it is a member of the Texas Christian Athletic League.
While their website used to essentially function as a recruiting blog, and had nothing in its "About Us” section, at the time of the newsletter, going to their website takes you to a “site in progress” page.
Sure, but who was Bishop Sycamore?
Literally not a person.
How did they get on ESPN?
Fairy tales, basically.
The team told some fibs that they had D1 prospects playing, when in truth, they did not. They also have players outside of high school age playing football for them (if they even have a roster at all). They also played a game two days before they played IMG, and fielded mostly the same players. If you’re not familiar with football, that is extremely dangerous.
ESPN couldn’t verify any of the information given to them about the team, and the announcers made that point abundantly clear. Their booking partner, Paragon Marketing, has taken most of the fall for booking and broadcasting the game, but Paragon doesn’t specifically set schedules for teams.
Okay, then who’s scheduling Bishop Sycamore for anything?
Though schools are now canceling games with Bishop Sycamore and his hearty gang of mostly-ineligible football players, a place called Prep Gridiron Logistics seems to have a hand in some of what’s transpired. PGL claims to offer free services to elite prep schools who want to add out-of-state or out-of-conference games to their seasons, but doesn’t seem to go so far as to officially book the games. The service (which appears to be run by a well-known high school football promoter) says it simply recommend matchups to its member schools in a middleman capacity, as it did with IMG and Bishop Sycamore, who are both listed as institutions they serve.
They also have a demonstrably weird vibe on Twitter, and, interestingly, neither IMG Academy nor IMG Football follow them, despite PGL promoting their membership on the site.
Surely, someone had to know what the fuck was up with the school, right?
Guess not. As of August 31, Bishop Sycamore is under investigation by the Ohio Department of Education.
What about the actual players? Or their families?
Zion Olojede of Complex has you covered on that front.2 In his interview with former player Aaron Boyd, Boyd revealed that the program (named COF at the time) stole money from a church, wrote bounced checks for hotel stays and didn’t provide players adequate housing, and took them to a library one time in October of the season he played with them to feign an education.
When asked how his mother reacted to the mess, Boyd said:
I moved so far. My mom couldn’t watch over me. I was telling her I was going to school. I was telling her what they were telling me to tell her: “We gon’ start school next week, we gon’ start school next week.” After October, I lost all hope. That shit was sad.
Two anonymous players from 2020 also shared similar stories as to how they got to Bishop Sycamore. Essentially, recruits were given brochures and pamphlets on how the program would benefit them, only to barely eat, have no athletic trainers, get into fights, and allegedly, commit crimes on behalf of the (now-fired) coach, Roy Johnson:
There was an incident where there was a homeless dude that tried to break into Roy’s car. That morning, we were supposed to practice, and everyone came out and… There’s videos of this, but I don’t want to release that because many players can get in trouble with the law—but they ended up jumping the homeless man and beating him.
Hold on. What the fuck?
Yeah! It’s not great.
The aforementioned ousted coach, who allegedly authorized his players to jump a homeless man and has pending fraud charges, was fired by the founder of the school (who also coaches their offensive and defensive lines) on Sunday. He also maintains that the program is not a scam, much in the same way that Richard Nixon said he’s not a crook.
If your brain hurt reading this in the same ways that mine hurt writing this, everything compiled in the newsletter this week is literally only the tip of the iceberg, and as more gets revealed about the program, the more confusing it gets.
It’s still not entirely clear who’s fully to blame for a football catfish bigger than Manti Te'o’s fake girlfriend, one that made its way to the highest levels of sports broadcasting. The truly bizarre and troubling issue, of course, is how anyone let the situation get this far. In addition to the older players they’re passing off as high schoolers, Bishop Sycamore is taking advantage of real, school-aged players looking for an opportunity for exposure and a college scholarship. And regardless of what their founder/athletic director/coach says, these young men are being led astray, and have legitimately been put in danger in the process. It’s a grim and incredibly fucking weird story that seems to unravel with each passing second, and at the end of the day, one hopes that every administrator or leader that turned a blind eye to this batshit story is held responsible for the young lives they’ve more than certainly ruined.
If you become more than a little interested in all of this, Ben Koo of Awful Announcing is doing quite a bit of the original digging into all of this, and is absolutely worth a follow on Twitter throughout this debacle.
Follow Zion Olojede on Twitter for his reporting on this. While Awful Announcing is doing work unraveling the logistical layers, Complex is providing the insight from the human angle and what the students have gone through.