By Brandon Simmons
Chances are when you’re watching a nationally televised high school football game, you’re not going to be familiar with at least one of the teams playing. In the case for Bishop Sycamore, they achieved that with viewers when they played highly-touted IMG Academy on ESPN, but they succeeded in their anonymity because nobody knows who they are in the first place. Monday, Awful Announcing reported a story which revealed a plethora of questionable moves leading up to Bishop Sycamore’s game against IMG, including the legitimacy of the school itself.
The huge part of this discovery is the game being played at all. The matchup was part of the Geico Kickoff Series, which focused on the best high schools across the country. In the report, it details how ESPN used Paragon Marketing to secure both teams, which is something the sports network has claimed to do for a number of year, per a statement they released on Monday:
“We regret that this happened and have discussed it with Paragon, which secured the matchup and handles the majority of our high school event scheduling. They have ensured us that they will take steps to prevent this kind of situation from happening moving forward.”
However, the details abut the game get worse. It was also revealed that Bishop Sycamore played a game against Sto-Rox, 2 days prior to their televised appearance. With a roster size of roughly 30 players, some of them had to play offense and defense in that game. One reporter told Awful Announcing that this was the cause for the injuries throughout Sunday’s game:
“Their roster was very small though – 30-35 players would be my guesstimate. And they had a bunch of injuries over the course of the game, which makes sense if they were playing for the second time in three days.”
When getting the past the game itself, Bishop Sycamore welcomes a litany of more problems. The article showed that Bishop Sycamore could not provide roster information in 2019, 2020, and again with this recent game, which they failed to deliver to ESPN and Paragon. It also questioned the legitimacy of the school, in which all the information found it to be “as a new online charter school”, but nothing that could helped them get acknowledged by the Ohio High School Athletic Association. Not to mention the accusations of them using older players in some of their games.
If people didn’t know who Bishop Sycamore was, they certainly do now. It’s clear that the ball has been dropped by all parties involved, but Sycamore had many faults on their end before Sunday’s game. Usually, people would say something sentimental like, “you gotta feel sorry for the kids”; but even with that you have to be careful, because those “kids” could be junior college dropouts over 21-years-old. In the article, Bishop Sycamore was constantly referred to as BS for abbreviation, which fit them entirely. It was a team that was 0-6 last year, had a depleted roster this season, but was supposedly one of the top teams to earn a nationally-televised spot, even though none of their players could be verified as to having any top D1 offers. This is one of those moments in sports where a lot of things get opened and revealed to the casual fan. People are finding out how these games are getting scheduled and what’s the process for setting everything up. With that many areas for reviewing and verifying, somebody should’ve pulled the plug on this game soon as something looked too fishy.