Stream It Or Skip It: ‘BS High’ on Max, a Deep Dive on A Football Team From A High School That Didn’t Exist

In 2021, high school football powerhouse IMG Academy played a nationally-televised game against an opponent no one had heard of–the Bishop Sycamore Centurions. As IMG barreled toward a 58-0 victory and injuries mounted amid comically-sloppy play, people began to ask–wait, who is Bishop Sycamore? In BS High, a new documentary streaming on HBO and MAX, we get a deep look into the high school that didn’t actually exist, and the man behind the headline-grabbing scandal.

BS HIGH: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: The Bishop Sycamore scandal grabbed headlines — and spawned official investigations and lawsuits — after the televised debacle in August 2021. But few have heard the story of the man behind the story, would-be school founder Roy Johnson. BS High tells the story of his attempt to create a high school football powerhouse from scratch, using interviews with Johnson, but also his former partners, players, reporters, investigators, and other figures involved in the scandal and its fallout.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Weirdly enough, the movie I kept thinking of while watching BS High was The Big Short. Sure, the latter is a scripted movie and not a documentary, and it’s about the financial world instead of high school sports. But there’s a common thread in a grift that absolutely shouldn’t have worked but did–for a time–because of an environment ripe for exploitation.

Performance Worth Watching: John Branham Sr., Johnson’s original partner in attempting to launch COF Academy, offers both key insights into how quickly Johnson tried to move–recruiting a team before even having a facility to practice in–and comic relief, as he’s still incredulous (and furious) about what happened. “Ay, man, the clown’s on TV!” he recalls yelling when he saw Johnson coaching in the infamous IMG game several years after their working relationship ended.

Memorable Dialogue: “Do I look like a con artist, or do I look like a regular, normal person?”, Roy Johnson–the central figure in the Bishop Sycamore saga–asks the filmmakers as they set up for his interviews. He knows that many people–quite fairly–view him as the former, and he’s fighting to disprove that here. (Spoiler: he does not succeed in the least.)

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: “I’m insecure, I’m an extremist, and I’m very resourceful. And that’s a bad combination,” Roy Johnson tells the camera early on in BS High. Johnson spends much of the documentary working hard to convince the viewer that his plans — plans that ended up with him fielding a high school football team without an actual high school attached to it — were something bigger than smoke and mirrors. In doing so, though, he only bolsters that image; the story of Bishop Sycamore is one of the wildest stories in sports in recent memory, and it’s even wilder once you meet the man behind it.

To understand how Bishop Sycamore ended up on that field against IMG Academy, a game that was nationally televised on ESPN and ended in a blowout so bad that the entire grift collapsed, you have to understand COF Academy. COF — short for Christians of Faith — was Roy Johnson’s vision, a dream of building a private Christian football powerhouse in Ohio that would rival IMG in prestige and on-field success.

The only problem? He didn’t have any facilities, any money, or any experience running a school, let alone building one from scratch.

“That was really something we had not even considered he could even possibly be lying about,” Ohio High School Athletic Association investigator Ben Ferree recalls, in finding out that Johnson had lied about COF Academy having an affiliation with the AME church. “But it turns out there’s nothing Roy won’t lie about.” After COF Academy collapsed, Johnson didn’t give up, though–he just pivoted, starting over again with Bishop Sycamore, a school he filled out through aggressive social media recruitment and willful ignorance of OHSAA eligibility rules.

There’s a lot of comedy in BS High, as Johnson remains animatedly unapologetic in his delusions, at one point comparing his recruiting strategy for potential players to Death Row Records founder Suge Knight’s pitch to hip-hop artists. He spends a good portion of the documentary claiming there were no rules against the things he was doing, even when there definitely were. Johnson is the kind of subject that documentarians and interviewers salivate over–someone who thinks he can talk his way out of the mess he’s created, and instead only digs a deeper and deeper hole. His grifts were both large and small, running the gamut from his fake high school down to tricking grocery stores into getting discounted rotisserie chickens and stiffing a paintball facility for an $800 tab.

“What do you think I was gonna do, they offered me credit and I took it!”, Johnson laughs at a story of him skipping out on a hotel bill for his players.

Where BS High hits harder, though, is in introducing us to some of the players who ended up swept up in his mad dreams. These young men became the butt of a national joke after the televised debacle against IMG, but they’re real people who had real dreams of making it in college and professional football. They put trust in Johnson, and Johnson — so convinced that his plan was going to work — betrayed their trust, and put them in a situation where some were seriously injured. They didn’t deserve this.

Our Call: STREAM IT. The Bishop Sycamore story is one of the wildest sports stories in years, and BS High is a thoughtful and thorough dive into how it all went down.

Scott Hines, publisher of the widely-beloved Action Cookbook Newsletter, is an architect, blogger and proficient internet user based in Louisville, Kentucky.