Did you think the damning HBO documentary ‘BS High’ closed the book on Roy Johnson and Bishop Sycamore? Well that might not be the case.
Per a report from Zach Joachim of The Richmond Times-Dispatch Wednesday, Bishop Sycamore is scheduled to play Life Christian Academy (based in Chester, VA) at Virginia State University in nearby Petersburg on November 9th. The past few weeks, there has been some message board chatter of a possible game, but this report confirms that indeed the game has been actually scheduled.
Let’s jump into this, shall we? First, some of the details from Joachim’s report.
“[Life Christian Academy football coach David] Fitzgerald said the new Bishop Sycamore staff is seeking to revitalize its reputation and he was contacted.
“Bishop Sycamore, they’re in a rebuilding process, and they basically have worked with a very reputable company that matches high school football games up,” said Fitzgerald, LCA’s first-year coach, adding that the Eagles play all their home games at VSU.
“Local coaches and ADs have in the past been resistant to scheduling LCA because they’re skeptical as to the program’s academic and eligibility standards.”
The “very reputable company that matches high school football games up” is believed to be Prep Gridiron Logistics, which is headed by Joe Mamione. Mamione played a critical role in scheduling Bishop Sycamore against IMG in the infamous ESPN game, and spent months before the game arguing on message boards about the validity of the Bishop Sycamore program. Mamione has stayed close to Johnson, has made media appearances defending the game, appeared briefly in the documentary, and attended interview appearances with Johnson in the wake of the HBO documentary’s release.
In the wake of the Bishop Sycamore scandal, Mamione created his own high school football message board site (seemingly looking to avoid further trolling on the existing sites he had a presence on).
A poster believed to be Roy Johnson had hinted of an upcoming game on that site earlier this month.
Who are these Bishop Sycamore players set to take the field in a few weeks? Who are the coaches? Are the players of high school age? How long have they been practicing, if at all? More importantly- are they being educated, fed, and have stable accommodations?
We’ll probably get some of these answers closers to the game. It’s odd to think of a football team playing just one game in a season, and one hundreds of miles away. But nothing about this story has ever been remotely in the vicinity of normal.
Perhaps it won’t happen. Perhaps it’s the beginning of an unexpected comeback.
Either way, if you thought this story was going to fade away or go away, here we are. Bishop Sycamore is set to play a game and Roy Johnson is set to be on the sidelines. And that fits with some of Johnson’s closing comments in the documentary about how eager he was to bring this back:
“Now I’ve got a platform to raise funds, to talk about what happened, to talk about what the program was about. You want to hear something that’s crazy about all this? More than 15 schools, after they canceled our season, want to play us next year. You thought Bishop Sycamore was going anywhere? You thought the stories that we made, the names that we called, you thought this was going somewhere? You didn’t think we were going to climb that tree. I can just see it now, just the apologies. You don’t have to apologize to me, just to them, to the players, all those people you said didn’t exist. You owe them an apology.”
Exactly what will happen with this game, though, is all question marks.
Update:
Prep Gridiron Logistics has seemingly noted that the game contract is not yet finalized in a tweet, which makes it sound like a game contract may not yet be in place despite the acknowledgment of the game by Fitzgerald . Additionally the message board thread talking about the scheduling of this game “Bishop Sycamore is playing. ‘I told you b$%ches'” has now been deleted entirely.
This is fake news. No such game has been consummated by either party.
— Prep Gridiron Logistics (@Prep_Gridiron) October 25, 2023
