Has ESPN been scammed by a fake high school? The real scandal goes much deeper | US sports

B.oh, when I was a quick but deaf substitute striker on the St. Ignatius college team, media exposure led the Chicago Tribune to occasionally print our scores on their sports pages – an important ink for an aspiring school team in the late 90s. It wasn’t until I left the big city for upstate Missouri that I became involved in the much higher aspirations of high school sports in much of America.

The first time I was sent 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 I could to keep myself from responding, “About what? His favorite color, Gatorade? ”As a naive reporter, I marveled at how often the newsroom fax machine was overflowing with results not from the NFL or the NBA but from high schools. It was similar when I came to Sports Illustrated and saw the countless submissions for Faces in the Crowd, a section dedicated to the achievements of everyday athletes – most of them under the age of 18 who guide a high school athlete rather than a luxury item because as a teenager describes, the line between amateurs and professionals seems to go from barely noticed to completely overlooked.

The inevitable ending point was the debacle that played out on ESPN last Sunday in the same Canton, Ohio stadium where the Dallas Cowboys and Pittsburgh Steelers opened the NFL preseason weeks earlier. On one side was the IMG Academy, a boarding school in Florida known for producing top athletes. On the flip side was Bishop Sycamore – a three-year online high school with a sense of irony that no one saw coming: you marched into that battle wearing a menacing old Greco-Roman helmet logo, then as the ultimate Trojan horse.

Shortly after IMG scored a goal on their first drive, ESPN player Anish Shroff jokingly introduced Bishop Sycamore as “a little bit mysterious”. After another IMG touchdown, a Bishop Sycamore lineman writhed on the floor in apparent pain; it was numbered 54. “We don’t have a 54 on the list,” said Shroff. Finally, in the middle of the second quarter, after a botched possession by Bishop Sycamore caused IMG to extend a 30-0 lead, Shroff was upset. “From what we’ve seen so far, this is not a fair fight,” he said, “and there has to be a point where you are concerned about health and safety.”

After IMG won 58-0, detective efforts to solve the mystery of Bishop Sycamore were expanded into overtime. Shroff couldn’t stop posting clues during the broadcast, revealing that the school was not a member of the Ohio High School Athletic Association and that its claim to accept multiple top college candidates could not be verified. Between the carnage on the pitch and the sight of some players sharing mismatched helmets, one had to wonder if Bishop Sycamore really was – like being in a real school. In fact, the Ohio High School Athletic Association said that “the physical location, exercise facilities, and eligibility for the squad could not be verified.”

Investigating the question further means digging a deep rabbit hole of dummy websites, dubious accreditation claims, and demonstrable cash flow problems – not least on one where Bishop Sycamore allegedly wrote invalid checks on his $ 3,596 Canton hotel bill. And it was hard not to assume the worst when the school gave a PO box and the Franklin University library as physical addresses. The Columbus Dispatch reported that another address for the school was actually a training facility that held soccer practice, but not academic classes. Equally suspicious: the names of some of the children of Bishop Sycamore, who allegedly resides in Ohio, also appear on the rosters of schools as far away as Maryland and California.

Former players and parents have made harrowing allegations about their experience with Bishop Sycamore. According to reports, the fake prospect of a Netflix documentary lured talented gamers into playing for school only to find there were no buildings or lessons, much less a TV show. Additionally, some of Bishop Sycamore’s players are only 20 years old and have played games in junior college. That certainly gives a new meaning to the cell phone videos that were recorded shortly before kick-off in the Centurion’s changing room. An assistant can be seen in it, telling the players not to enter the field of play “if they are not ready to kill”. It doesn’t matter that this was their second game in three days.

The Scooby-Doo villain in all of this is Roy Johnson – the coach who has been the subject of a federal fraud investigation and at least three lawsuits; who has a warrant for no-show in a domestic violence case; and which, according to some former gamers, gets all of its plays from the Madden video game series. On Sunday, he was offered chances to abandon the game or speed up the clock in the first quarter, and both were turned down.

Johnson was fired this week by Andre Peterson, the founder of Bishop Sycamore, who also coaches the football team’s offensive and defensive lines. (I said the rabbit hole was deep.) Peterson denies he is running a scam and says his son is in school. “If it’s a scam and the kids don’t go to school and don’t do what they’re supposed to do, then I’m literally cheating on myself,” Peterson told Columbus Dispatch. “And most of all, I hurt my own son.”

Paragon, the marketing group that arranged the Bishop Sycamore appointment for ESPN, has admitted their complicity. As for ESPN, the production team raised the alarm after basic information about the school could not be verified and relayed those concerns to those higher up the chain of command. But the game went on anyway and turned out to be just as one-sided as feared.

Ohio Governor Mike DeWine has called on the state Department of Education to investigate Bishop Sycamore and said it was “not clear” whether Bishop Sycamore met the basic educational requirements. Unsurprisingly, a number of opponents of the alleged high school have withdrawn from scheduled games since Sunday’s farce – as ESPN color analyst Tom Luginbill voiced.a total scam“. And as convenient as it is to portray Bishop Sycamore as a motley bunch of glorious Has-Beens who have been waxed by a bunch of teenagers, you will spare the so-called victims of these scammers some ridicule.

IMG, one of the most powerful sports and entertainment agencies in the world, is running a high school soccer program that is storming across the country with a 1% chance of producing a Sunday professional. Her trainer is Pepper Johnson, a two-time Super Bowl winner who won three other titles as an apprentice under Bill Belichick. They think Johnson would at least read the room and be able to go easy on these Columbus candidates. But he had no problem getting the score up and naming time outs to extend the game – which was as big a payday and potential PR ditch for IMG as it was for their opponent, who made no bones about their (almost certainly doomed ) Wish made the IMG of the Midwest.

And ESPN still treated the game as an oversized ceremony, ranging from admissions from the Pro Football Hall of Fame to promos of the blockbuster matches that line up on the college football slate. Shroff and Luginbill, despite their on-air shock, still turned on a formidable IMG rusher as the next Ezekiel Elliott – as if that didn’t create impossible expectations for a teenager. It wasn’t long ago that ESPN was the one who got to the bottom of the world scandal at Manti Te’o; now it is the one who is being fooled.

That’s the cost of turning high school sports into big business that will only rise if college student athletes are really paid. The stakes are higher, the control more intensive. Meanwhile, more and more players have to be squeezed and discarded for content, not unlike this nameless linebacker in jersey 54. Yes, Bishop Sycamore has been exposed, but the real fraud – the professionalization of high school sport – flourishes unchecked. Where is the depth there?