If there ever was a bizarre sports story out there, it would probably be the Bishop Sycamore High School football scandal. HBO Sports has revealed they have attained the television and streaming rights to a documentary that chronicles what exactly happened with the high school from Columbus, Ohio. The currently unnamed documentary is set to debut sometime in 2022 on HBO and will be available to stream on HBO Max.
To give you a little more context into this scandalous story, think of it as a sports team that could have gone to great heights, but didn't quite get there. First of all, Bishop Sycamore High School, was in fact, not an actual accredited school, but one that was simply self-proclaimed.
On August 29, the Bishop Sycamore Centurions went head-to-head with IMG Academy, a prestigious sports, performance, and educational boarding school in Bradenton, Florida. The game was nationally televised on ESPN and the Centurions ended up losing with a score of 58-0. The devastating loss had football fans and audiences questioning the legitimacy of the Bishop Sycamore football program as well as suspicious activities from the program’s head coach Roy Johnson, who ended up getting fired.
Johnson told WCMH-TV in Columbus that he believed there was a mistake on the paperwork, which led to the “misconception” that it was a school. “We do not offer curriculum,” Johnson said to the news station. “We are not a school. That’s not what Bishop Sycamore is, and I think that’s what the biggest misconception about us was, and that was our fault. Because that was a mistake on paperwork.”
According to the press release, "the unnamed sports documentary will explore two beguiling questions: What exactly is Bishop Sycamore and who in the world is Roy Johnson?"
The HBO Sports film is executive produced by Adam McKay and Todd Schulman for Hyperobject Industries, Michael Strahan, Constance Schwartz-Morini and Ethan Lewis for SMAC Entertainment, Jay Peterson, Todd Lubin and Jack Turner for Boat Rocker’s Matador Content, Alex Mather and Ankur Chawla for The Athletic, and Spencer Paysinger for Moore Street Productions. The TV and streaming rights for the feature documentary belong to Strahan and Schwartz-Morini’s SMAC Entertainment, McKay’s Hyperobject Industries, Boat Rocker’s Matador Content, and The Athletic.
The Bishop Sycamore documentary is set to debut sometime in 2022 on HBO and will also be available to stream on HBO Max.