What Happened to Bishop Sycamore?
What Happened to Bishop Sycamore?
By Jace Hinton November 15, 2024 05:42
Columbus, OH—Reading the location, you probably think the article is about The Ohio State, but actually, it's about a football team and high school that was not even real: the Bishop Sycamore Centurions, whose record of 0-2 included a 58-0 blowout loss to IMG Academy out of Florida.
"This was when Deion Sanders was doing his Prime Prep, and there were a couple of high schools that I knew were in strip malls in Florida and Maryland and places like that," Allen Trieu told 24/7 Sports as he was doing his background research on Bishop Sycamore on how they fooled everyone into thinking they were a prep team. They were looked at as a new charter school.
Players from Bishop Sycamore were receiving fake offers, and Bishop Sycamore was also feeding lies to the media about practices. Players have stepped forward, claiming that the rumors about the Centurions using Ohio State facilities were false and that they practiced next to housing that housed Ohio State students. Some players had over 20 offers, all from at the time P-5 schools, and then were come back to be as false and never were real.
Bishop Sycamore also ran a Wing T offense, an old-school fancy name for Triple Option offense, so those who play Madden or NCAA 25 when you run a Triple Option play are typically out of a Wing T formation. So you can pass in a Wing T formation, but not enough for your receivers to have offers from Alabama. Teams typically run that if they have particular skill types; for example, the military academy does not usually have the skillset to throw the ball around the field. So when IMG Academy came out lighting up the scoreboard, it was no surprise for IMG to play teams that didn't have a developed offense, but for their receivers to have all those offers and catch maybe three passes all game should have raised some concerns, and it did for some.
Bishop Sycamores, head coach, was in the con. Leroy Johnson Jr. was an AD at Christians Faith Academy before he became the head coach of Bishop Sycamore. Former athletes also stated that their play calls came from the video game Madden. They also, as a team, attacked a homeless man who tried to break into Johnson's car. There was also a fraud arrest warrant out for Johnson at the time, so it would be safe to say to pull off this con, they found the right guy for the job.
Bishop Sycamore became a social media bashing ground after it emerged that the team was a con scheme. After they were shut down, all sorts of investigations were launched into the team. Asking the question, "What happened to them?" seems odd when we could ask, "What were they?" All of it was just a con.
It's safe to say that Bishop Sycamore will not be back in action ever, but you can catch the HBO Max documentary "BS High," which is all about the Bishop Sycamore con.
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