The Bishop Sycamore saga rages on for another day as the roster of players we have found out were either not listed on a game televised on ESPN or not supposed to be out there because of their age.
The Sycamore roster includes postgraduate players who are as old as 19 or 20, some of whom are alleged to have already played in juco games.
In the wake of the major scandal, the team lost four high school football opponents following the debacle from its appearance against one of the top programs in the nation. DeMatha Catholic, Duncanville, Liberty and Johnson Central all decided to cancel games with Bishop Sycamore, according to Max Preps. The team had a schedule filled with top-tier programs across the U.S., but after losing to IMG Academy 58-0 and the revelation the school duped a marketing agency to be put into a national television slot, the handful of teams have reconsidered playing the school.
“We have been doing a lot of researching, and after discussing it with our coaching staff, we decided to cancel that game with Bishop Sycamore because they have ineligible players and it would be a liability issue. We think this is the right decision,” DeMatha Carolina president Fr. James R. Day told USA Today.
Aaron Boyd played at Bishop Sycamore under its previous name, COF Academy. He played in 2018-19, starting at the school as a 15 year old, when most of the players on the team were 19 or 20 years old, he said.
Boyd exposed the program and its staff, from blatantly false claims in recruiting, to numerous bounced checks to pay for housing in hotels, no actual schooling, and even robbing grocery stores to eat. The team also did not practice and would regularly play two games in three days.
“Everybody that knows me already knows this,” Boyd said. “It’s just the fact now it’s on a greater scale, I have to say something.”
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“They told us we’re gonna be the IMG of the Midwest. They lied to me and my mama,” Boyd said.
The players stayed at a hotel and would soon discover that the housing wasn’t being paid for, as the program’s coach wrote “bounced checks for everything.”
“We didn’t go to school. We never went to school. I can’t lie, they tried once. They took us to a community library. One day. It was already October—the season was about to be over. It was like at this point, “Well, shit, I’m not going to school. Y’all haven’t put me through school this whole time.”
[…]
“Most people were already out of high school so it didn’t really affect them. I know me and this other kid ended up at rival high schools. That st ruined a lot of st. It’s sad to see. I wouldn’t say all they players are JUCO. I know some kids that are seniors in high school and now their senior year is gone. That’s how it was for me. My junior year was taken away from me. Everything I did my junior year didn’t matter because I was on a fraudulent team…
Bruh, I had to come back and redo my whole junior year and I had to do it in time so I could play football my senior year.”
