UHND.com - Notre Dame Football, Basketball, & Recruiting

Typically when they air a high school game, it's 2 elite teams, sometimes from the same region and sometimes from different ones. But tons of preparation goes into it, and the simplest of due diligence would have told them that even if "Bishop Sycamore" had been a real high school (more on that in shortly), they had won roughly 2 games in the last 3 seasons, and most of their losses were horribly lopsided. It's a mystery how this one even got green-lighted for television, even if Bishop Sycamore had been better at presenting as a real school.

Bishop Sycamore itself is a scary scam. They started out as "Christians of Faith Academy" before they were shut down, and the coach re-invented the program as "Bishop Sycamore." There is no actual school. He'd recruit players from other schools with all kinds of promises of being the IMG of the Midwest, they'd sign up men who were 20 and 21 years old who had already played 4 years of H.S. football, and "classes" consisted of perhaps one trip to the library and a class on religious faith taught by the coach himself. He'd sign the team up to travel to different Ohio cities for games, with the requirement that his team be paid a travel stipend (which he was pocketing himself) and pay for their hotel. His playbook was -- no joke -- the playbook from Madden Football on XBox.

They were under investigation for being a fake school as both C.O.F. and as Bishop Sycamore, and yet it took the public spectacle of the IMG Academy game on ESPN for them to finally be shut down.

Tons more embarrassing details if you google it. Bottom line, a horrible human being was running a scam to enrich himself at the expense of kids who wanted to play football in the spotlight with no other real options.