Friday Night Lies: The Bishop Sycamore Story

Journalist King and Ferree, a former assistant director at the Ohio High School Athletic Association, debut with an overlong report on Roy Johnson’s fraudulent efforts to establish a high school where teenagers who dreamed of joining the NFL could hone their athletic skills with an eye toward going pro. In 2021, Florida’s IMG Academy beat Columbus, Ohio’s Bishop Sycamore High School 58–0 in a game that was televised on ESPN, drawing scrutiny to Sycamore’s program and founder, Johnson. King and Ferree outline the revelations that followed, centering on the misdeeds of Johnson, a shady entrepreneur who organized dubious insurance schemes before starting the Christians of Faith Academy in 2018, which was intended to compete with IMG as a pipeline to the NFL, but failed to get the proper licensing from the Ohio Department of Education and folded later that year. Undeterred, Johnson founded Bishop Sycamore High School in 2019, recruiting players whose “football or academic careers didn’t go as planned” only for them to realize once they got to Ohio that the threadbare educational program consisted of a patchwork of online classes. Unfortunately, readers’ eyes might glaze over at the meticulous accounts of the complicated legal paper trails created by Johnson, and it remains unclear just how he profited from the scam, with conflicting reports about whether Bishop Sycamore charged tuition. This gets lost in the weeds. (Sept.)