How Bishop Sycamore, the Washington Generals of high school football, conned ESPN

Ray Holtzclaw was glued to ESPN’s broadcast of IMG Academy and Bishop Sycamore long before the internet started buzzing about the game Sunday night.

Holtzclaw counted players on the Bishop Sycamore sideline, trying to identify recognizable faces. He wondered how Bishop Sycamore was able to field a remotely competitive squad against IMG Academy, a superteam based in Bradenton, Fla., that annually is loaded with top prospects sought by the best college programs in the country.

Why did Holtzclaw care so much? His son, a talented quarterback prospect named Judah, was almost on that field in Canton, Ohio. And IMG’s defensive linemen, who hold scholarship offers from Alabama, Clemson, Ohio State and the rest of college football’s elite programs, probably would have teed off on Judah the way they did Bishop Sycamore’s quarterbacks in a 58-0 IMG win.

“It’s really sad,” Holtzclaw told The Athletic on Monday. “They have some good kids on their team that just want to play football, want to go to the next level, whatever. But the guys that run it lie and cheat. It’s terrible.”

So who are those guys? And how did a game between the best collection of high school football talent in the country and a fly-by-night online school — which also had played a game less than 48 hours earlier — wind up on ESPN? It took quite a cast of characters:

There was the coach who now has created two schools from thin air and keeps leaving a trail of unpaid bills.

There was the superteam run by a conglomerate that had canceled on that coach in 2018 because officials feared his team wasn’t legitimate — but then played him in 2020.

There was the guy who orchestrates matchups on the side whose day job is VP of sales at Billboard, the publication that charts the biggest hits in music.

There was the marketing company president who was the first person to put LeBron James and Tim Tebow on national television.

There was the TV network that trusted the package it had bought would make for compelling viewing but didn’t bother to do any due diligence leading into a game it ultimately would bear the brunt of the criticism for airing.

Some of that criticism came from ESPN’s own broadcast crew of Anish Shroff and Tom Luginbill.

ESPN’s commendations WENT IN on Bishop Sycamore 💀 pic.twitter.com/RCJv46gOA3

— BuckeyeScoop.com (@kirk_barton) August 29, 2021

The coach’s name is Roy Johnson. The Columbus, Ohio, resident runs Bishop Sycamore, but before he created the school with the initials B.S., he formed a similar team at a school called Christians of Faith Academy. To catalog the litany of issues surrounding the team at COF Academy would require a deeply reported six-part series, which is exactly what a reporter named Andrew King* wrote in 2018 for This Week News, a community paper published by Gannett in the Columbus area. King’s stories detailed a school that was originally pitched as being funded by the African Methodist Episcopal Church. There were plans for a sprawling campus that, according to Johnson in one of King’s stories, got delayed because endangered bats lived in the trees near the potential site for the school. The plan was scuttled after the church disavowed the project. The stories also detailed a 2018 lawsuit against Johnson by First Merchants Bank, which sought repayment of a $100,000 loan.

(*King covered the Columbus Crew for The Athletic in 2019.)

The first tangible evidence of COF Academy was its football team, which scheduled games against some of the best high school teams in America. One of those was IMG Academy. A press release from IMG Academy dated May 17, 2018 touted an Oct. 26, 2018 matchup between IMG and COF in Bradenton. A source told The Athletic that the game originally was to be played in Columbus, but a COF Academy coach called and said a stadium couldn’t be secured. So instead, the schools planned to play in Bradenton. But later, someone from COF Academy asked IMG Academy to front the money for the team to travel to Bradenton. Something seemed fishy to IMG Academy football staffers, so the school canceled the game.

But much of the football staff had turned over by 2020 when IMG Academy’s original schedule was decimated because of the COVID-19 pandemic. So, needing a game, IMG turned to Johnson, whose team was now called Bishop Sycamore. The teams met Oct. 16, 2020. IMG Academy won 56-6. But few noticed. This meeting didn’t appear on the most widely distributed sports cable channel in America.

So how did IMG Academy and Johnson find one another? They were introduced by a matchmaker named Joe Maimone, who runs a company called Prep Gridiron Logistics when he isn’t selling ads for the publication that told us that “Old Town Road” holds the record for the most consecutive weeks (19) spent at the top of the singles chart. Maimone is a huge football fan and considers Prep Gridiron Logistics to be his labor of love.

Most normal programs, understandably, are hesitant to play an all-star team like IMG Academy. What Prep Gridiron Logistics does is create an online scheduling database for high schools across the country looking for games and helps create matchups. Maimone told The Athletic that he has 160 clients, mostly elite programs such as IMG Academy, Bishop Gorman in Las Vegas and Don Bosco Prep in Ramsey, N.J. He also has “pet projects” such as Bishop Sycamore, programs he wants to help get exposure because he believes in their stated mission of helping prospects get a second look.

When IMG approached Maimone looking for a game, he said Bishop Sycamore was the only program in Ohio that wanted to play.

“The blueblood Ohio programs, like St. Ed’s and St. Ignatius, none of them stepped up to play this game,” Maimone said. “You can’t blame Bishop Sycamore for doing that. They’re the only ones who had the courage to do so. They should be rewarded, not freaking lambasted.”

But based on Bishop Sycamore’s scheduling the past two years, it appears that rather than coaches putting together a team of high school-aged Division I prospects hoping to show their stuff against the best teams in the country, they have created a team of high school players and postgraduates with few real offers that exists essentially as the Washington Generals of high school football. They get smashed by some of the best teams in the country, and they go home. In 2020, Bishop Sycamore went 0-6 and was outscored 227-42 in a schedule that included five of Ohio’s best programs and IMG Academy. The 2021 schedule includes games against national powers such as Duncanville (Texas) High, DeMatha Catholic in Hyattsville, Md., and St. Frances Academy in Baltimore.

But the most curious and troubling part of Bishop Sycamore’s slate is the game that doesn’t appear on the schedule. The school lists its season opener as a game against Archbishop Hoban in Akron, Ohio. That game was played Aug. 19, and Archbishop Hoban won 38-0. The next scheduled game was Sunday’s matchup with IMG Academy.

But Bishop Sycamore also played a game Friday against Sto-Rox High in Pittsburgh that doesn’t appear on any schedule. Sto-Rox won that game 19-7. Johnson told The Athletic that Bishop Sycamore fields multiple teams.

“We had a couple guys play a couple series in that one game to give them a look because we didn’t have practice that day,” Johnson said. “Normally, what we would have was practice Friday, walkthrough Saturday and played on Sunday. So instead of that, we had some series here and plays there with a couple things to work on for IMG.”

But video of the Sto-Rox game posted online shows the same players who played in that game playing in the same positions against IMG Academy on Sunday. (Note: ESPN removed the IMG game broadcast from YouTube.)

Rashid Ghazi said he had no idea Bishop Sycamore had played on Friday when the team kicked off against IMG Academy on Sunday. Ghazi is the president of Paragon Marketing Group, which has matched up high school teams and partnered with ESPN to produce games for most of this century. It was Ghazi who pitched the idea of a game between Akron’s St. Vincent-St. Mary — featuring a young LeBron James — and established high school hoops power Oak Hill Academy on ESPN in December 2002.

Three years and several high-powered basketball and football matchups later, Ghazi sold a football game between Nease High from St. Augustine, Fla., and Hoover (Ala.) High. Ghazi originally wanted a game between Nease and loaded Lakeland (Fla.) High, but he instead had to settle for introducing a national TV audience to Nease quarterback Tim Tebow and to the Hoover Bucs, who were in the process of filming a reality show that chronicled their season. “Two-a-Days” debuted in spring 2006 and featured a scene in which future Tennessee head coach Jeremy Pruitt — then Hoover’s defensive coordinator — pretends to not know what asparagus is.

That Nease-Hoover game aired the weekend before college football kicked off in 2005 and launched an annual tradition. Paragon would package several games involving the nation’s top teams, and ESPN would happily broadcast those games on its family of networks. Five of this year’s games did match teams that each had Division I prospects. But one didn’t, and it’s the one everyone is talking about.

“The vetting process and the issues with the matchup are 100 percent on Paragon,” Ghazi said. “As the guy who founded the ESPN relationship and the president of the company, it’s really 100 percent on me.”

Ghazi blames himself for not circling back to ensure that the roster Bishop Sycamore coaches submitted in the spring matched the team that would take the field on Sunday.

The roster seemingly had potential. That’s the same vision the Holtzclaws had when they agreed to join the Bishop Sycamore program. Judah Holtzclaw felt as though he needed Bishop Sycamore: Though he was a legitimate prospect for Westerville (Ohio) Central in the 2021 recruiting cycle, the pandemic prevented him from performing at camps in front of college coaches. Ray and Judah felt it would have been best to take a gap year, play for a prep school with a loaded schedule and maybe get on television and garner attention that way.

The Holtzclaws were sold on Judah being the face of a prep school playing an elite schedule, but after they agreed to join the team, nothing added up. They were unable to meet the entire coaching staff. There were few other players to work out with Judah. There were no organized team events. Equipment was scarce. Everything went wrong. Ray even offered to have some of the Bishop Sycamore players tag along on the camp circuit this past spring, but he was stuck with footing the bill for hotel rooms he was never supposed to fund. He paid Bishop Sycamore $1,500 and paid for items such as cleats and dinners for some of his son’s teammates.

Eventually the Holtzclaws backed out. Judah worked the camp circuit and accepted an offer from Youngstown State, where he’s now playing tight end.

“When you look at the schedule they put together, I thought if we could put a team together to play that schedule, it could be good for Judah,” Ray said. “They are playing these big-time teams. After we backed out, we noticed they weren’t making payments on their obligations, whether it was hotels or housing for the team.”

Ray, who grew up in Texas, even contacted a future Bishop Sycamore opponent, Duncanville (Texas) High, to inform them that they’re playing a team that has players who are 19 or 20 and may not even go to class at all. Whether that game is still played after what happened on ESPN on Sunday is in question.

Johnson swears he didn’t dupe anyone. He gave The Athletic 10 names on Monday morning of players on his roster with FBS offers, including quarterback Trilian Harris — who played in two games in three days. But for the most part, the names he provided didn’t match the makeshift roster given to the ESPN commentators.

Imagine that. Bishop Sycamore didn't give the TV guys an accurate or complete roster.

This is the "roster" we were given when they played Archbishop Hoban last week… 🤦‍♂️🤦‍♂️ pic.twitter.com/e51OJCAuOA

— Ryan (@Isley23) August 29, 2021

“The goal for Sycamore has always been to help young men get to college,” Bishop Sycamore director Andre Peterson told The Athletic. “It has always been to address those needs of some of these young men who didn’t get it from the regular schools. So whether it was academics, whether it was things that were socially, dealing with some emotional issues, or whatever the case may be, it’s always going to get these young men at the college. And to try to help right those things that they have wrong in their lives.

“I try to defend when people who say, ‘Oh well, yeah, you lied about kids having Division I offers?’ Well, I guess the best way for me to fight against that is having you sit down with us on signing day.”

On Bishop Sycamore’s MaxPreps page, the address listed for the school is 303 South Grant Avenue in Columbus. That is the address of the library at Franklin University. In 2020, the school listed its address with the state’s department of education as 3599 Chiller Lane. That is the address of Resolute Athletic Complex. The Columbus Dispatch quoted a Resolute employee Monday saying that a group of about 30 football players used the turf fields and weight room about once a month.

But who needs practice when a team can play twice in three days? Ghazi also said he would have fought against playing the game had he known Bishop Sycamore had played Friday.

“I didn’t find out until (Sunday) evening,” he said. “If I had known they played on Friday, I would have pulled the plug on the broadcast and highly recommended to the teams that the game not be played. We would have canceled the game.”

On Monday, ESPN issued a statement and punted all the blame to Paragon. “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.”

Ghazi willingly accepts that blame. But few ultimately will remember the marketing company that packaged the game. Mostly, they’ll remember which network got scammed into airing a game that should never have been played in the first place.

(Top photo: Still from Sunday’s broadcast of Bishop Sycamore versus IMG Academy)