Bishop Sycamore and Scam Discourse
Or: How the fake football team is like Elizabeth Holmes
Earlier this month, The New York Times ran a follow-up story on the Bishop Sycamore scam. You might remember the story from last summer, when the Ohio “school” going by that name faced IMG Academy in a football game broadcast on ESPN. The game was so lopsided that the announcers openly worried about the health and safety about the players on the field, and strongly hinted that the school had lied about the status of its team.
Those concerns were almost immediately validated. Bishop Sycamore was not, in fact, made up of top high school recruits—it was mostly made up of kids who had already graduated from high school, and were looking for a second chance to play football and get noticed by college recruiters. And it was not really a school—it was had no physical campus, did not seem to enroll students, and employed no teachers. After the game on ESPN, the Ohio Department of Education announced that Bishop Sycamore was a “non-chartered, non-tax supported school” that they had little information on besides PO Box mailing address.
Bishop Sycamore only opened in 2018, and seems to have exploited the scheduling chaos caused by Covid-19 to schedule games against top high schools from around the country, who were desperate for opponents after many games were canceled due to the pandemic. In 2020, it played six games against top high schools from Ohio, as well as IMG Academy, and lost all six by a combined score of 227-42.
In other words, they were a kind of Washington Generals of the elite high school football circuit, serving as a punching bag for teams that needed opponents. In fact, it was later reported that Bishop Sycamore had played a game just two days before their meeting with IMG; many players appeared in both games.
The whole thing is very depressing, and the word everyone jumps to immediately is “scam.” That’s certainly the tone of the Times story, and the day after the story appeared the ODE issued a report using exactly that word to describe Bishop Sycamore, while conceding it had little authority over it, since it has neither a charter to revoke nor funds to withhold. But, oddly, none of the former Bishop Sycamore players included in the Times piece come off as embittered. Even the saddest story included—a former quarterback who was at one point living out of his car in Columbus and is now in a psychiatric ward at a Bronx hospital—said he did not regret the experience: “I still think it’s a good opportunity.”
Right now, the jury in Elizabeth Holmes’ fraud trial is deliberating, and will reportedly keep deliberating into the new year. Holmes, in case you are somehow unaware, is the former CEO of Theranos, the fake blood-testing company whose story has been a book, a podcast, a documentary, and now a movie.
Like the Bishop Sycamore story, the Theranos story feels like a scam, but that is sort of what the trial is supposed to determine: Did Holmes knowingly mislead people about her company’s technology, or did she simply fail to execute her ambitious plan? Put another way: Did she believe her own bullshit?
Obviously I can’t know what was in her head, but to me the answer seems almost beside the point. Exaggerating how advanced your technology—and the eventual impact of that technology—is standard Silicon Valley stuff, whether it’s Jeff Bezos on drone delivery, Uber on self-driving cars, or Elon Musk on basically anything. Maybe Holmes’ lies meet the legal standard for fraud, and those other lies don’t—but from a larger, social perspective, hers were far less harmful. Theranos’ lies left no trail of car accidents or suicides or bottles of pee in their wake.
Which makes all this “scam” discourse seem like something of a distraction. It puts all the focus on what companies fail to do, and not what they actually do. The real issue with Theranos was not that its technology was fake—it was that, even if it were real, it would not be remotely as valuable as the company claimed. It is a high-profile example of how investments in medicine go into flashy innovations of limited utility. Money is poured into ways to make care flashier (“do your blood tests at home!”), instead of simply distributing it more equitably.
Similarly, the real issue with Uber is not that self-driving cars are nowhere close to imminent—but that in their place, Uber has simply underpaid drivers by circumventing or simply rewriting labor laws and taxi regulations. And the issue with Bishop Sycamore is not that it was fake, but that it very easily could have been real…
Before it was exposed, Bishop Sycamore billed itself as “the IMG of the Midwest,” evoking the reputation of the school that ultimately pummeled it into literal oblivion. The real IMG Academy, in Florida, was initially launched as the Nick Bollettieri Tennis Academy back in 1978. It was purchased by IMG in 1987, and is now owned by Endeavor—the billion-dollar talent conglomerate run by Ari Emanuel. It exists as both a series of training centers and college-preparatory boarding school, and in many ways represents the merging of amateur athletics and professional training.
IMG didn’t even have a football program until 2010, and now it’s generally considered the best high school team in the country, attracting elite players from all over the nation who go there because it’s a great way to develop your skills and attract the attention of college recruiters. It has a beautiful campus, state of the art facilities, and boasts an 11:1 student-teacher ratio. It is, in other words, exactly what Bishop Sycamore was pretending to be.
In reality, Bishop Sycamore players were lodged in cheap hotels—that is, until the school’s bounced checks got them kicked out. They were told take classes online, but there was no follow-up by the school (which seems to have had no academic staff at all). Assistant coaches seemingly quit in the middle of the year when paychecks never came. Roy Johnson, Bishop Sycamore’s founder, kept insisting that money would come in, that a top-notch facility would be built, and eventually everything would get sorted out. The IMG of the Midwest, like self-driving cars or Theranos’ magic blood tests, was just around the corner.
There’s a documentary in the works about Bishop Sycamore, and likely it will get into the issue of whether Johnson had any reason to believe this, or whether he was just lying—in other words, whether he was a scammer. But, much like the issue around Holmes’ trial, that feels unimportant here. The issue, again, is why people wanted to believe the scam, and if you read the Times story, the takeaway is clear: They just didn’t have that many options. As one kids says, “We come from a horrible background, a horrible environment… The Bronx, to make it out of the Bronx, New York, it’s hard. It’s so easy to go down the wrong path.”
The story documents the dire circumstances players faced, and while it successfully garners sympathy for them, it fails to persuade you that Bishop Sycamore caused any of these circumstances. Perhaps Bishop Sycamore was never on track to become a haven for football talent, but such schools do exist and the spots in them are highly coveted. That’s why one its former players can say “I still think it’s a good opportunity”—even if the chances of success were low, they were still worth taking for a lot of these kids.
We don’t like scammers because they exploit people’s hopes, and certainly it is sad to read about the false promises these kids were fed by people behind Bishop Sycamore. But it can be tough to draw firm lines between exploiting people’s hopes and encouraging them. In some ways, the Bishop Sycamore kids are the inverse of the investors duped by Theranos. While the latter believe so much in the system that they were eager to believe one magic blood test machine could fix the health care industry, the former had so little faith in the system that it was reasonable to believe a fake high school football team really was their best shot.