Was ESPN scammed by a fake high school? The real scandal goes much deeper

Back when I was a speedy but numb-footed backup striker on the St Ignatius varsity team, media exposure meant the Chicago Tribune occasionally printing our score in their sports pages – major ink for a striving school team in the late 90s. It wasn’t until I left the big city for the hinterlands of Missouri that I got hip to the far loftier pretensions of high school sports across much of the rest of America.

The first time I was dispatched to cover a high school basketball game, with a request from my University of Missouri sports editor to interview the top scorer, it took everything in me to hold back from replying: “About what? His favorite color Gatorade?” As a naïf reporter, I marveled at how the newsroom fax machine was often jammed with results not from the NFL or the NBA but high schools. It was much the same when I joined Sports Illustrated and saw the reams of submissions to Faces in the Crowd, a section dedicated to the achievements of everyday sports people – the bulk of them under 18. And with every magazine story, Netflix doc or prospect guide that describes a high school athlete like a luxury commodity rather than a teenager it seems the line separating the amateurs from the pros goes from barely noticed to completely missed.

The inevitable endpoint was the debacle that unspooled last Sunday on ESPN, inside the same Canton, Ohio stadium, where the Dallas Cowboys and Pittsburgh Steelers kicked off the NFL preseason weeks earlier. On one side was IMG Academy, a Florida boarding school famous for churning out top athletes. On the other was Bishop Sycamore – a three-year-old, online high school with a sense of irony no one saw coming: they’d march into this battle with a menacing ancient Greco-Roman style helmet logo only to go down as the ultimate Trojan horse.

Moments after IMG scored on their first drive, ESPN play-by-play man Anish Shroff somewhat jokingly introduced Bishop Sycamore as “a bit of mystery”. After another IMG touchdown, a Bishop Sycamore lineman was writhing on the ground in obvious pain; he wore the number 54. “We do not have a 54 on the roster we were given,” Shroff said. Finally, midway through the second quarter, after a bungled Bishop Sycamore possession set up IMG to extend a 30-0 lead, Shroff turned fretful. “From what we’ve seen so far, this is not a fair fight,” he said, “and there’s gotta be a point where you do worry about health and safety.”

After IMG went on to win 58-0, the sleuthing effort to solve the mystery of Bishop Sycamore spilled into overtime. Shroff couldn’t stop dropping clues during the telecast, disclosing that the school wasn’t a member of the Ohio High School Athletic Association and that its claim to include multiple top college prospects couldn’t be verified. Between that, the on-field slaughter and the sight of some players sharing mismatched helmets, you had to wonder if Bishop Sycamore was for real – as in, an actual school. Indeed, the Ohio High School Athletic Association was damning saying the school’s “physical location, practice facilities, and roster eligibility could not be verified”.

Examining the question further means spiraling down a deep rabbit hole of dummy web pages, dubious accreditation claims and demonstrable cash-flow problems – not least one involving Bishop Sycamore allegedly writing invalid checks for their $3,596 Canton hotel bill. And it was hard not to assume the worst when the school submitted a post office box and the library at Franklin University as physical addresses. The Columbus Dispatch reported another address for the school was actually a training facility where football practices were held, but no academic classes. Just as suspicious: the names of some kids from Bishop Sycamore, which says it is based in Ohio, also appear on rosters for schools as far away as Maryland and California.

Former players and parents have come forward with harrowing allegations about their experiences with Bishop Sycamore. Talented players were reportedly lured to play for the school by the bogus prospect of a Netflix documentary, only to discover that there were no buildings or lessons, let alone a TV show. In addition, some of Bishop Sycamore’s players are as old as 20 and have played games in junior college. Certainly, that gives new meaning to cell phone video taken inside the Centurions locker room just before kickoff. In it, an assistant can be viewed urging players not to step on the field “if you’re not ready to kill”. Never mind that this was their second game in three days.

The Scooby-Doo villain in all this is Roy Johnson – the coach who was the subject of a federal fraud investigation and at least three lawsuits; who has a warrant for failing to appear in a domestic violence case; and who, according to some former players, sources all his plays from the Madden video game series. On Sunday, he was offered chances in the first quarter to abandon the game or speed up the clock, and refused both.

Johnson was fired this week by Andre Peterson, the Bishop Sycamore founder who also coaches the football team’s offensive and defensive lines. (I did say the rabbit hole was deep.) Peterson denies he is running a scam and says his son attends the school. “If it’s a scam and the kids are not going to school and not doing what they’re supposed to do, then I’m literally scamming myself,” Peterson told the Columbus Dispatch. “And most importantly, I’m hurting my own son.”

Paragon, the marketing group that arranged the Bishop Sycamore date for ESPN, has admitted its share of blame. As for ESPN, its production team sounded the alarm after basic information about the school couldn’t be fact-checked and took those concerns to those higher up the command chain. But the game went ahead anyway and proved to be every bit as one-sided as feared.

Ohio’s governor, Mike DeWine, has called on the state education department to investigate Bishop Sycamore and said it was “not clear” whether Bishop Sycamore met basic education requirements. Unsurprisingly, a number of the alleged high school’s opponents have pulled out of scheduled games since Sunday’s farce – which ESPN color analyst Tom Luginbill pronounced “a total scam”. And convenient as it is to clown Bishop Sycamore as a motley crew of glory-chasing has-beens who got waxed by a bunch of teens, spare some derision for the so-called victims of this con.

IMG, one of the most powerful sports and entertainment agencies in the world, runs a high school football program that barnstorms across the country, betting 1% odds of producing a Sunday pro. Their coach is Pepper Johnson, a two-time Super Bowl winning linebacker who won three more titles apprenticing under Bill Belichick. You figure Johnson at least would be able to read the room and take it easy on these Columbus pretenders. But he had no problem running up the score and calling time outs to prolong the game – which was as big a payday and potential PR grab for IMG as for their opponent, who made no secret of their (almost certainly doomed) desire to become the IMG of the Midwest.

And ESPN still treated the game as an outsized ceremony, cutting from shots of the Pro Football Hall of Fame to promos of the blockbuster matchups forthcoming on its college football slate. Shroff and Luginbill, for all their on-air shock, still went right ahead touting one impressive IMG rusher as the next Ezekiel Elliott – as if that doesn’t seed impossible expectations for a teenager. It wasn’t so long ago that ESPN was the one getting to the bottom of Manti Te’o’s catfishing scandal; now it’s the one getting duped.

Such is the cost of making a big business out of high school sports, which only figures to grow once college student-athletes really start getting paid. The stakes will be higher, the scrutiny more intense. All the while scores more players figure to be squeezed and discarded for content, not unlike that unnamed linebacker in the No 54 jersey. Yes, Bishop Sycamore was exposed, but the real scam – the professionalization of high school sports – thrives unchecked. Where is the deep dive into that?