The 'Evil' Football Coach Who Scammed His Way to ESPN
Bishop Sycamore boasted the most ideal acronym imaginable, given that the school was nothing but a bullshit scam.
Claiming to be a football academy that was both affiliated with a high school (which it wasn’t) and could get kids into a Division I college program (which it couldn’t), Bishop Sycamore turned out to be a fraud, and on Aug. 29, 2021, it was exposed as such when its team was embarrassingly blown out by high school powerhouse IMG Academy on ESPN. The fallout was swift, especially for its mastermind Roy Johnson, who gets to tell his story—as suspect as it is—in BS High, a new HBO documentary (Aug. 23) about this scandalous tale of deceit and exploitation.
“Do I look like a con artist?” asks Johnson upon sitting down for BS High, and the question more or less doubles as an answer. With a mischievous twinkle in his eye and fire in his mouth, Johnson begins by professing his love of the ’80s action TV show The A-Team and its leader Hannibal Smith (George Peppard), whose habit of hatching and executing crazy schemes (“I love it when a plan comes together!”) he sought to emulate. After failing in his bid for a pro gridiron career, Johnson—while interning for the New York Jets—became enamored with the idea of working as a general manager. Having already successfully landed his younger brother on the Ohio State University squad, Johnson seized his chance to realize his dreams when the African Methodist Episcopal Church in Ohio came to him about helping to launch Christians of Faith (COF) Academy, and he, in turn, convinced them to add a football component to the school.
John Branham Sr. was the co-founder of COF and has nothing nice to say about Johnson, who initially pretends to not know who Branham is and then downplays his contributions to the academy. Branham’s distrust of the shady Johnson drips off his tongue, and it’s not difficult to see why, since BS High affords Johnson ample opportunities to present himself as an arrogant and untrustworthy huckster. Johnson’s the type of crook who thinks he’s winning people over by confessing that he’s a liar, not realizing that his schtick only reinforces one’s immediate, overpoweringly negative opinion of him. He delivers a persuasively unlikable performance in Travon Free and Martin Desmond Roe’s documentary, cackling at his own jokes, defending his disreputable behavior, and cursing up a storm (both on camera and in a parking lot) when he’s confronted by video of one former player crying over the scheme Johnson perpetrated.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/bs-high-review-the-evil-football-coach-who-scammed-espn?ref=home
It saddest for the kids and parents he scammed.
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