Are you ready for some football?
Bishop Sycamore High School from Columbus, Ohio, clearly wasn’t — but that didn’t stop its head coach and co-founder from somehow finding a way to get his team on the field against the storied national powerhouse IMG Academy on Aug. 29, 2021, in a game that was televised nationwide as part of the ESPN High School Kickoff Series.
What happened next will go down in infamy as one of the most bizarre, disturbing and inexplicable debacles in recent high school sports history. IMG destroyed Bishop Sycamore 58-0, but that just begins to tell the story. From the opening kickoff, it was clear there was a huge talent chasm between the blue-chip prospects at IMG and the disorganized bunch from Bishop Sycamore to the point where the ESPN announcers expressed concern for the health and safety of the Sycamore players who were getting laid out all over the field. When a Bishop Sycamore player went down with a torn ACL, the team’s trainer knelt next to him to assess the extent of the injury. Bishop Sycamore’s “trainer” was the mother of a team member. She literally had the word “MOM” emblazoned across her T-shirt.
There were no trainers. Sadly consistent with a team representing a phantom school.
The Sycamore-IMG game spelled the end of Bishop Sycamore High School, the high school that never was. Watching the solidly packaged HBO Sports Documentary “BS High” (never was there a more perfect title), I was stunned by the series of events that led to that nationally televised disaster, and I found myself shaking my head time and again at the outrageous and infuriating audacity of one Roy Johnson, the glib and pathologically dishonest con man/coach who orchestrated the whole thing.
Like many an egomaniacal narcissist who thinks of himself as the smartest person in the room — any room — Johnson is his own worst enemy. He foolishly agreed to sit down for a series of interviews with the filmmakers, and if he thought he could win us over with his double-talking, passive-aggressive, weirdly upbeat and self-serving justifications, well, he’s one clever idiot.
“Are you sure I look cool?” Johnson asks the documentary crew as they settle in for his first interview. “Do I look like a con artist? Or do I look like a regular, normal person?” The fact Johnson would even ask that is the beginning of the answer to his own questions.
Johnson initially aligned himself and his nascent football team to a Columbus school called Christians of Faith (COF) Academy in 2018. There was grand talk of building a state-of-the art, multi-million-dollar facility, but when Johnson held a “Media Day” for COF’s football team, the lone reporter who showed up found a disorganized “practice session” taking place in an indoor training facility called Super Kick, which Johnson had rented out for the occasion. As for the players: They were high schoolers, and in some case former high schoolers, who were looking for one last chance to make it to the next level. Some were 18; some were older. Many came from tough backgrounds. They arrived at COF believing that Roy Johnson had created a program that could help them overcome the bad grades and the bad breaks, and get them into a D-1 school.
“We played 11 games with no financial backing,” boasts Johnson. What that means is Johnson kept figuring out ways to not pay for anything, including the bills for the various hotels where his players stayed, before everyone would get evicted and move to another hotel. (There was literally no school to attend.)
When COF was shut down after the Ohio Department of Education found it was “not open for instruction and had no pupils in attendance,” Johnson simply pivoted and changed the name to Bishop Sycamore Academy, which sounded official but was fictional. “There’s nothing Roy won’t lie about,” says Ben Ferree, the former investigator for the Ohio High School Association who tried to warn the world about Johnson for years before the IMG slaughter shined a national spotlight on the mess.
After the IMG game, the ruse fell apart, with Johnson finally acknowledging, “We are not a school,” and all the teams on BSH’s remaining schedule canceling their games. The hotel where the team stayed for the IMG game accused Johnson of using counterfeit checks to pay the bill. It was learned that dozens of PPP loans were found in the names of BSH students.
“BS High” directors Travon Free and Martin Desmond Roe do a splendid job of alternating between present-day interviews with Johnson as well as a number of former Bishop Sycamore players, who will break your heart as they talk about the realization the dream Johnson was selling to them was almost all illusion. We also benefit from the vast array of footage from the COF days, as Johnson had “hired” two videographers to chronicle the story. Those videographers spent about six months on the job, and say they were paid a total of $60.
