The ongoing Bishop Sycamore situation has now led to the school parting ways with head coach Roy Johnson. Bishop Sycamore director Andre Peterson told Chris Bumbaca of USA Today Tuesday that they’d parted ways with Johnson Sunday after a much-criticized nationally-televised 58-0 loss to IMG Academy.
However, Johnson (seen above during that game) appeared on a Twitter Spaces event Monday representing Bishop Sycamore, and Peterson didn’t object to that. Peterson also tried to dispute claims that the school, which currently has no listed address on their website and has had many questions raised about their housing, academics, and more, is a “scam.”
Here’s more from Bumbaca’s piece:
The Bishop Sycamore Scandal
- ABC6 analyst Jay Richardson claims “zero involvement with Bishop Sycamore,” but interviews, court docs, and past clips dispute that
- Prep Gridiron Logistics, company behind Bishop Sycamore/IMG game, detailed the whole mess on message boards
- Exclusive: Former OHSAA investigator shares frustrations that schools ignored his warnings about Bishop Sycamore red flags
- Bishop Sycamore taken off FloSports schedule, but questions remain on relationship with Prep Gridiron Logistics
- Bishop Sycamore director Andre Peterson parts ways with coach Roy Johnson, claims school is not a “scam”
- Former Bishop Sycamore player revealed more about the program and confirmed a lot of stories
- What it was like being a parent of a Bishop Sycamore player
- We learned more about how Bishop Sycamore ended up playing on ESPN, and it’s only getting shadier
- ESPN’s announcers spent a lot of the IMG-Bishop Sycamore HS blowout criticizing Bishop Sycamore’s selection for it
Andre Peterson, who played for Jim Tressel at Youngstown State in the 1980s, is Bishop Sycamore’s founder, director and currently coaches the football team’s offensive and defensive lines.
On Tuesday, he told USA TODAY Sports that the football coach, Roy Johnson had been fired Sunday after the game. Peterson also defended Bishop Sycamore’s purpose of giving players a better chance of playing college football and denied any inkling of a “scam” related to Sunday’s game or Bishop Sycamore.
“There’s nothing that I’ve gotten out of this that would constitute it as a scam because I’m not gaining anything financially from what we’re doing,” Peterson told USA TODAY Sports on Monday night. “The reality of it is that I have a son (Javan) that’s also in the program and has been in the program for four years.
“If it’s a scam and the kids are not going to school and not doing what they’re supposed to do, then I’m literally scamming myself. And most importantly, I’m hurting my own son. So when people say stuff like that … I would literally be taking my son’s future and throwing it in the trash.”
That piece is worth reading in full, as it also illustrates how the school is not listed for 2021-22 by the Ohio Board of Education, and how it was listed last year as “a ‘non-chartered, non-tax supported school,’ a type of school that ‘because of truly held religious beliefs, choose to not be chartered by the State Board of Education.'”
It also doesn’t provide satisfactory answers for why the school’s address is a post office box (Peterson claims harassment of their athletes), where its players did their schoolwork (Peterson says they rented a building, but provides few details there), what that schoolwork looked like and so on. But it does illustrate that Peterson intends to press on with Bishop Sycamore, and now intends to do so without Johnson.
