The Bishop Sycamore football situation is absolutely insane
If you haven’t yet heard of everything happening with Bishop Sycamore, a “school” in Ohio that duped ESPN into broadcasting a 58-0 loss between their football program and IMG Academy’s, sit down now and prepare yourself.
It would quite literally take me an hour to describe what exactly is going on (trust me. I spent much longer than that reading article after article on this subject on Monday), so there will be links below for more in-depth explanations. With the way this story was exploded, it likely will only get even more interesting. New information regarding the school and its founders is popping up left and right.
So here’s what happened. Sunday, Bishop Sycamore, a sketchy “charter” school based in Columbus, OH, played the No. 1 high school team in the country, IMG Academy on ESPN. It quickly got out of hand, with IMG–which boasts several of the nation’s top recruits–began to pour on the points. At one point, the announcers began to point out that Bishop Sycamore lied about how many Divison I-level prospects they had on their roster.
That’s when things really got interesting.
Questions were immediately raised: How did ESPN let this happen? Could they not have Google’d all of this? What’s the deal with Bischop Sycamore?
Well, several media outlets decided to dive into the story and figure out what the hell is going on.
Here is what we know:
ESPN did get duped, but they wasted no time passing the blame onto Paragon Marketing Group and president Rashid Ghazi, who has taken full blame for the negligence in picking the matchup. Paragon is the group that picks–and supposedly vets–the games that ESPN will air. Paragon did little to no research at all on Bischop Sycamore.
Bishop Sycamore also does not have multiple Divison I prospects, as they had led Paragon and ESPN to believe. The football team had also played a game on Friday night, in which they lost 19-7 against Sto-Rox High in Pittsburgh. The head coach for Bishop Sycamore said that he had two different sets of players suit up for both games, but video evidence from both games has proved otherwise.
Two games in three days? How is that legal? Well, when you aren’t a member of the Ohio High School Athletic Association (OHSAA) you don’t have to abide by the regular rules. Bishop Sycamore has no record of being in the OHSAA database after being “founded” in 2019.
According to The Columbus Dispatch, Bishop Sycamore is hardly a school at all. It classifies “‘as a non-chartered, non-tax supported school,’ a type of school that ‘because of truly held religious beliefs, choose to not be chartered by the State Board of Education.'”
Most of the players for Bishop Sycamore, which doesn’t have a school building or even a functioning website, aren’t even high school players. Some have been faking their recruitments and using fake names to garner attention. There are JUCO players on the roster. ESPN couldn’t verify any of the players on Bishop Sycamore from its recruiting database.
Also, the head coach, Roy Johnson, has an active warrant out for his arrest in Delaware, OH. There was a GoFundMe established to help pay for the football team’s expenses that reached $140 of the $20,000 goal. Bishop Sycamore went 0-6 last season, losing by a combined score of 227-42.
This isn’t the first time the people behind Bishop Sycamore have done this either. A previous school, Christians of Faith Academy, was also started by Johnson and featured a shady football team that eventually folded due to unpaid bills.
There’s a Kentucky connection here, too. As of right now, Bishop Sycamore is still scheduled to play Johnson Central this Friday. Johnson Central includes four-star Kentucky commit, offensive tackle Grant Bingham.
All of the information above was provided via these links: The Athletic, Complex, AwfulAnnouncing, and The Columbus Dispatch.
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