Downloaded from YTS.MX
Official YIFY movies site: YTS.MX
Anger is a blanket emotion, right?
If anger is an umbrella,
then under that umbrella is hurt.
♪ (OMINOUS MUSIC PLAYING) ♪
Confusion.
Disappointment.
And a whole lot of scared.
Because your mind goes towards the worst, right?
You're reading some of these things
and you're starting to think like...
"What could I have done better?"
Like, "What could have I done to change the, you know,
change the outcome of this?"
♪ (THEME MUSIC PLAYING) ♪
Our first story is fascinating.
It could be a book. It could be a movie.
How this happens got a lot of people scratching their head.
It was a nationally televised game on ESPN
featuring a national powerhouse, IMG Academy,
playing a team called Bishop Sycamore.
- Bishop Sycamore. - Bishop Sycamore.
Bishop Sycamore.
It sounds like an old pimp. Bishop Sycamore.
They got on ESPN and got their asses wiped out.
End zone, hauled in by Tate with one hand.
Low throw. It's caught.
And reaching across the goal line, touchdown!
Bishop Sycamore, they're a bit of a mystery in this game.
When did ESPN start producing comedy?
Get right back out!
Get that shit out!
Bishop Sycamore told us
they had a number of Division I prospects.
Look at this shit!
A lot of that we could not verify.
Reports are now claiming
Bishop Sycamore is not even a real high school.
No facilities, no building,
kids staying in hotels.
And they're not actually high school players?
How does this get on ESPN?
How does that happen?
There's got to be a point now, Lugs,
where you do worry about health and safety.
I already am worried about it.
I do honestly feel bad for them.
For you to be able to go through all this,
things must be going bad in your life.
Governor DeWine is calling
for an investigation into Bishop Sycamore.
It starts with a coach named Roy Johnson.
Roy Johnson is facing a civil lawsuit
for alleged fraud.
Turns out the whole thing is a scam.
ESPN just wants the money.
Look at them eyes, shifty.
He looks like he up to something shady.
"Get that goddamn camera off my face, man."
The initials are BS High.
Shut up!
♪ (MUSIC CONCLUDES) ♪
Let's show you where the magic happens.
This is where we're holding up
for the next couple days.
Terrified.
Yeah, that's what Neo said.
And look what problems it caused him.
- Just machines, right?
So, I took a crash course in body language.
Do you want my hands like this? Like this?
- Like that? Like, yeah, it's... No, man.
No, man, 'cause, listen, body language is so important.
Do you realize if I sit in a certain way,
people are gonna think that I don't care?
Just be natural. You don't have to try.
Are you sure?
Are you sure I look cool?
Do I look like a con artist?
♪ (TENSE MUSIC PLAYING) ♪
That's what I'm asking. Do I look like a con artist?
Or do I look like a regular, normal person?
Okay. Yeah. There was a specific question in there.
I think that Roy is probably thrilled
to be in a documentary.
Sitting in front of a camera and talking
is probably his ideal scenario.
Do I really want to be famous?
Do I really want people to see me?
Did me wanting to be so loved and seen
and people like me and all that,
that good feeling and all that, trump everything else?
I used to be a local news reporter in Columbus, Ohio,
and I was one of the first people to cover the story.
Roy could absolutely be the next in a long line of people
to fall on their own sword on a national scale
because he talks too much in a documentary.
A lot of Roy Johnson is anecdotal, right?
A lot of it becomes...
legend.
I'm a son, a brother, a nephew,
a coach, a motivator, a father.
Those are, like, the serious answers.
But for a little bit easier answer
that people can digest, I always refer to...
The A-Team.
♪ ("THE A TEAM" THEME MUSIC PLAYING) ♪
Amy Allen. I'm Hannibal Smith.
I understand you want to hire the A-Team.
I took the embodiment of that show.
Like I thought I was Hannibal.
Like, literally, to the point where I would have a cigar.
I literally thought I was Hannibal.
Are you still tinkering with miniaturized electronics?
- Yeah. - Then I have a plan.
Hannibal would come up with plans all the time.
And then the plans were crazy, right?
Even though the plans didn't necessarily work out
the way they should, they worked.
I love it when a plan comes together.
♪ (THEME MUSIC CONCLUDES) ♪
Tell me about your football experience.
- Is that... Is that...
Oh, buddy.
I figured that would be easy to talk about, football.
Yeah, well, football in itself is easy to talk about.
But the courage to do what we did
is deep, deep, deep, deep,
deep rooted.
♪ (GENTLE MUSIC PLAYING) ♪
I tried to walk on at Ohio State.
That didn't work out.
And then I end up getting an internship
with the New York Jets. And when I got that
and got to be around Coach Belichick,
Bill Parcells, Leon Hess,
I wanted to be a GM,
I wanted to be a general manager.
I was fascinated with that.
Even at that young age, I would look at Pepper Johnson,
Bryan Cox,
Frost, and say, "You guys are these gladiators,
physical masterpieces."
The scripture "we were created in God's image"
must have been thinking about this.
And these two old guys over here are controlling you.
You wanna run tonight, son, or you wanna act
like a... ...rabbit?
It was amazing to watch.
♪ (CHOIR MUSIC PLAYING) ♪
Born in New York, and I was raised in Long Island.
Growing up, we went to a church
on the corner of these two streets,
and I can hear my mom singing right now.
And my brother and I would be champing at the bit
to get out of night service before the streetlights came on.
So we could go play football.
My brother is the best football player
that I've ever seen.
Fast, strong, relentless. And he was cold-blooded.
As a big brother, I wanted to make sure
that I could take his talent and put it on a bigger pedestal.
I'm telling the little kid,
undersized kid in New York,
"You gonna play for Ohio State one day."
"Are you sure, Roy?" "Follow me."
How many times I went to talk to teachers
because they failed him,
and then when he couldn't play football,
I had to go beg teachers to get his grades up.
So when my brother went to Ohio State,
I saw that high school football changes lives
because it provides opportunities
to get higher education.
When I started this whole thing,
for me, it was an opportunity to take it
from my brother or two or three kids
to helping an entire football team,
an entire school.
I had been working
for the African Methodist Episcopal Church
for about three or four years,
just doing random projects to help.
So, they came to me and said,
"Hey, we're thinking about opening a school
called Christians of Faith
to help young men get an education, go to college."
At this point, you know, working,
years working with my brother, getting him into college
and getting young people into college
through the avenue of football, I was like, "Hey, you know,
I don't mind working on this project,
but we have to add a football element to it."
The first day I met Roy,
it was after a football game.
He just said he always wanted to have a team.
He wanted to impact kids.
I had coached for a long time, and I was like,
"Oh, that's easy. I can tell you how to do that."
For me, it was an opportunity to have
a Christian school powerhouse.
And what better place to do that than Ohio?
We talked about this, I mean, every single day.
I mean, to two at night sometimes.
And my wife is over there and she's like,
"Hey, man, look, just let me know.
You and Roy got something going on.
What's going on? Is it Roy or is it Regina?"
Tell me about John Branham Sr.
and his role in this process.
- Who? John Branham Sr.
Who's John Branham Sr.?
Of course, he would say that,
because he knows I know the beginning.
I know every ins and outs.
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Oh, yeah. He, um, he was around for a few weeks.
He was helping us out with advice. Real smart.
I can't say a few weeks. That wouldn't be right.
So... six months, seven months maybe.
The goal was to get the school started
and sports to come in about two to three years.
He was like, "You're talking about
a 150-million-dollar project.
It takes years to build something like this."
The money was supposed to come
from people getting insurance policies
through the church and leaving that money to the school.
So, "Hey, you want to help out the school?
Take out a 100,000 dollar life insurance policy.
You can leave whatever percentages to your family
and then leave a certain percentage to the school."
So then he gives me a list of things that we're going to need.
And once he gave me that list, it's just like anything else.
Just go get it.
♪ (UPBEAT MUSIC PLAYING) ♪
So I get into my Hannibal mode,
just putting the grind on and getting out there.
Kept talking to people,
talking to people, talking to people.
We had people calling from other states like,
"Hey man, I want to coach, I want to help you guys."
And we hadn't started anything.
We had got engineers and architects
to draw up this facility.
And the facility had a rooftop basketball court
and little ponds for kids to go fishing in.
The idea was that if the facility is really good,
it'll help draw in the players.
It would probably cost hundreds of millions of dollars
to do something like what they were talking about.
Especially to build, like, physically build a school,
a building, a field, like, renovate a whole thing.
Next thing I know, I get a call from Roy.
He's like, "Branham, that place you took me to, SuperKick,
the indoor facility, we're going to rent that
for the kids to practice."
I said, "Yo, man, what kids?"
♪ (DRAMATIC MUSIC PLAYING) ♪
I go up to SuperKick indoor facility.
There was a bus, like a tour bus,
with kids getting off the bus, coming to practice.
And I'm sitting there like, "What the hell?"
This is not what we were supposed to create.
I was going to choke his ass.
How can you go and coach a team of young kids
and you know it's not a school.
It's my philosophy of business is,
do what the people who have the money do,
even if you don't have the money.
I trusted Roy all up into the point
where I didn't trust him.
I'm insecure, I'm an extremist,
and I'm very resourceful.
And that's a bad combination.
I... I remember the first day
that I learned about COF Academy,
which was probably the same time I learned who Roy Johnson was.
COF Academy was Christians of Faith Academy,
which was the precursor to Bishop Sycamore.
♪ (WHIMSICAL MUSIC PLAYING) ♪
Ben Ferree is a former investigator
for the Ohio High School Athletic Association.
He said he began looking
at Bishop Sycamore's predecessor years ago.
I worked at the Ohio High School Athletic Association
for eight years.
It was my job and, uh, I was pretty good at my job.
So I knew a lot about high school sports.
The Ohio High School Athletic Association
is the governing body
for high school sports in the state of Ohio.
Its general mission is to have some sort of fairness
in the competitive landscape
to protect the players, to protect the schools.
I met Ben when I was a freshman in college.
Um, he was a year older than me,
and he also worked on the newspaper.
Ben loves rules.
He loves, like, minutia and, like, following the rules
and being like, "Hey, look at this weird thing."
He's like a little puppy who, like, finds things,
and then just like dig, dig, dig, dig, dig, digs.
It was, I think, the summer of 2018
and Ben was doing this job at the OHSAA,
where he always wound up with weird stories.
One day, he just sent something to the group chat, like,
"I have this really weird school
that is, like, a brand-new school
and says they're D1 with 750 kids."
And it was very clear, very fast
that this was one of those things
that Ben was going to sink his teeth into.
I was intrigued by Roy, um,
because he... he opened my mind to what fraud could be.
I had no idea
the depths with which you could get away with things.
And his life provided a fantastic case study
for all the flaws of the legal system.
Let's go, everybody, let's go, let's go.
Here you go.
Three, two, one. Yellow, let's go.
I met Roy at an indoor soccer training place called SuperKick.
- They were having a media day.
And I get there, and it's all just sort of, like, chaos.
There's like, kids running around,
people with clipboards and stuff,
but there wasn't any organization or anything.
And there was basically no other media there at all.
It was pretty much just me
and someone that they had hired to do video for them.
Roy was sharper than
most of anybody I've ever met.
He knew what to say, how to say it.
Um, he knew how to talk about things
that were way beyond me as far as how to build a school
and what hoops and things you had to jump through.
We actually met at a Panera Bread.
This dude had long Adidas socks on,
gym shorts and a big Iron Man T-shirt.
So, he sat down, but the moment the guy started talking,
we were both impressed. We were ready to go.
Talked for two or three hours.
Really sold us on the vision.
We had the proposal ready and he saw the number on it.
Didn't even flinch about it.
He's like, "I'm going to go to the bank.
I'm gonna get you guys squared away
within the next month.
No problem."
Anthony and I walk out into the parking lot,
and we just closed the biggest deal
of our life, man.
The plan was to have them get as much film as they could,
and then put it all together
and see what we could do with it.
He... He said,
"You're going to get us on Netflix."
I was like... "All right."
Yeah, right?
Maybe one day get it on HBO or Netflix or whatever, right?
It seemed like we were gonna kind of build...
You know, you don't want to say
the communications department of the school,
but it kind of was that.
Um, kind of be the creative directors
of the school that's about to start,
that's supposed to be an IMG Academy
of Columbus, Ohio.
This here is a brotherhood.
♪ (INTENSE MUSIC PLAYS) ♪
We hold ourselves to a higher standard
than anyone could ever set for us.
Work harder. Get stronger.
Be smarter. Play faster.
- Dream bigger.
♪ (MUSIC CONCLUDES) ♪
IMG Academy is a school that was built
to be an academic arm
of what is basically a sports academy.
They are probably the most known school in the country
when it comes to athletics.
They have the best facilities,
the best schedule, the best trainers,
always one of the top-ranked teams,
gets kids to college, gets kids to the NFL.
Nothing about IMG seems like a high school.
It seems like a professional team.
Like, if you look at the facilities they have,
they're as good as any college or pro team.
They're kind of like the establishment,
and they're what COF Academy was essentially striving to be.
There might not be that many schools in America
that are as high profile as IMG Academy,
but the same concept applies
to dozens or hundreds of schools around the country.
All of these schools exist for the same purpose,
which is to play football.
And education, or taking care of the kids,
or any of that stuff, is secondary.
I think Roy looked at IMG Academy
and he said, "Why can't I do that?"
But with kids from bad backgrounds.
With COF Academy, their target demo
was athletes who were good at football
or thought they were good at football,
but were not going on to play at the next level.
Be that because they didn't have the grades to get into college
or didn't have the grades to academically qualify,
or be that maybe they didn't have any offers
to play at the next level but felt that they should.
And that's really the dream that they sold them on,
was, "We will get you into a D1 school."
"If you come here,
we're going to get you into big schools.
We're going to bring in top talent.
We're going to bring in the D1 talent.
We're going to rival IMG."
So, when people say D1 or Division I,
they're really talking about the highest levels
of college football.
These are the schools that you see on television.
That's where people see you.
That's where you get measures of fame and celeb.
If Christians of Faith does begin placing
multiple kids in D1 programs, then Roy all of a sudden
becomes a nationally known high school coach,
that you go play football for Roy Johnson,
he can get you into D1 programs. That would have a lot of cachet.
Go.
So, I walked around, talked to other coaches
like, "Y'all do understand
there is no school."
He's like, "Oh, man, you know, you gotta--
You got to let that go."
I said, "I'm gonna tell you what I'm gonna let go.
I'm gonna let go of his neck after I grab it."
So he left, and then
the other people working on the projects, they left.
And then it was just these couple
of parents and myself.
- ♪ (GENTLE MUSIC PLAYING) ♪ The real shocker came
when the AME Church issued their statement,
saying they had no involvement with COF Academy.
It was poor communication between that bishop,
that administration, and the pastors.
He just didn't have the heart to be like,
"Yeah, I said it was okay."
That was really something we had not even considered
he could possibly be lying about.
But as it turns out,
there's nothing Roy won't lie about.
So...
they pull out and...
why don't you guys stop COF at that point?
I couldn't.
This is the part I go back and forth on all the time
between whether it's ego or whether it's heart.
♪ (LIGHTHEARTED MUSIC PLAYING) ♪
See, I knew the kids. I knew them.
I knew the neighborhoods they were from.
I knew some of them were homeless.
Now they had nowhere to go.
What was I supposed to do? Just leave them?
Go back to these 50 kids and say, "Let me do you
like everybody else that did you up to this point."
Do you think it was irresponsible
to keep pushing the program forward
even though you didn't have the money?
- Yes. Would you do it again?
Yes.
♪ (DRAMATIC MUSIC PLAYING) ♪
I'm Magneto. These are my mutants
and I'm fighting for 'em.
Any means necessary, I'm gonna get this done.
I kept the season afloat on my own.
I've seen some of the best football.
We played in a gorgeous stadium.
This team flew all the way to Texas.
Don't walk past the time if you don't mean it!
COF flew to Texas.
We played 11 games
with no financial backing.
This is what let us know that the dream was possible.
This is what let us know that it could work.
We failed as COF.
The church pulled out, it was a failure.
And so let's get back to the ground.
Let's find out what we didn't do right on the first time.
Let's get back at it. Let's get on the schedule.
Let's get the better kids, let's keep going,
and let's push and get this done.
So we started working on Bishop Sycamore.
♪ ("STEP HARDER" BY RXALU LOADED PLAYING) ♪
♪ Can't nobody tell me nothing They know I'm built for this ♪
♪ Daddy counting dirty money Hoes think I'm filthy rich ♪
Andre Peterson was one of the coaches at COF Academy.
His son was in the program.
He was a prominent part of what became Bishop Sycamore.
♪ (DRAMATIC MUSIC PLAYING) ♪
If he had some Infinity Stones and a gauntlet,
you would think he was Thanos.
He's like the Black Thanos.
I was passionate about it
because I believed in the vision.
I saw the desire,
but most importantly, I saw the need.
My dream for Bishop Sycamore was
a place for young men to be able
to come and get the help that they needed.
Christians of Faith and Bishop Sycamore
should absolutely be considered the same school.
For all intents and purposes, they were.
It was run by the exact same people.
In their first year of existence,
Bishop Sycamore was wearing COF Academy's equipment.
Because COF ended so badly,
I kicked up the notch on recruitment.
When we looked at the young men
that we were bringing into the program,
it was something in their life that wasn't right.
They had an unhealthy home life.
They had bad grades.
They needed more film because they didn't play a lot.
The end goal was they wanted to go to college.
Since I was a kid,
my dad's never been there.
You know, he's never came to a football game of mine.
I'm a big mama's boy, but I always wanted my father.
So, you know, it was hard.
♪ (GENTLE MUSIC PLAYING) ♪
I kept it under my skin.
I didn't really say anything. But as I got older,
I always wanted my dad, you know?
And that's where it started playing a big toll
on just me mentally.
I connect with the game of football.
It brings heart, drive, dedication,
you know, hunger.
If you don't have hunger, you can't become a man.
You got to eat in this world. So I'm gonna eat.
Where I'm from, opportunities don't come around.
So when you have an opportunity, you got to capitalize on it.
And that's what I was trying to do.
Coming from a broken household,
getting evicted back-to-back,
and so football is just a way to help get my mind away
from everything that was going on at home.
When I was seven years old,
my dad caught a murder charge, or homicide.
So football was
the only way that I had, a... a male support.
That was where I was getting disciplined.
It was always that family effect.
At first when Roy hit me,
I was in need of an opportunity.
♪ (PENSIVE MUSIC PLAYING) ♪
It was COVID.
I was, you know, just sitting on the couch, working out,
waiting on the gyms closed to open up.
They seen me on the QB list,
they've seen that I was top ranked.
They said, "We a up-and-coming program."
Got to explaining the teams they were playing, IMG,
Saint Francis.
"Okay, you know, Coach, talk to me, you know.
You know, you sound nice,
all right? Like, what-- what's up?"
When you're realizing
that something that you just put a lot of your life
in that was supposed to be your way out is over,
and someone comes along and tells you,
"No, it's not over. In fact, it's just starting.
You're going to be playing in Alabama."
A lot of people would-- would buy into that.
They dream of being in the NFL. They dream of being rich.
They dream of being famous. And you sell them the idea that,
"Hey, I'm going to get you to these places
that will give you the chance to get there.
All you have to do is work hard."
I got promised
that I'd be at a big-time school. I'd be D1.
Basically, I got promised
everything you will want to hear.
Well, he called my mom.
He was telling her, "Oh, we're supposed
to be playing a big-time school called IMG."
I took the phone, I was like, "Yo, IMG is a dream school,
I always wanted to play against them or play with them."
So, I went to learn,
to better myself and to play football,
to get a... a scholarship, to go D1.
If you go to Bishop Sycamore's Twitter page,
it is literally just hundreds of messages tweeting at players,
"Hey, DM me. Hey, DM me. Hey, DM me."
The dream that they sold them on was,
"We will get you into a D1 school."
He was saying, uh,
"You just come and play ball...
and we're going to get you to school."
He was just selling me a dream.
At the time, you know, I was in a lost space.
So I took it as a chance for me to start something new.
I looked at my mom,
I said, "It's gonna be the biggest opportunity.
You know, it's going to be life-changing for me."
Coach Roy DM'd me on Instagram.
"Hey, what's up, bro?
I want to fly you out and let you come to our school.
This school I'm building up, all-Black coaching staff,
I want to build it up."
I'm like, "All right. Bet, bet, bet."
You know, it sounds like a fairytale story.
Damn, I got this opportunity
and I don't have nothing else. I'm just home.
So this is a time for me to like, potentially get
a scholarship somewhere,
because, man, where we come from,
our parents don't have money
to pay for school, no big-time university.
I'm gonna get y'all the opportunity to get filmed.
I'm gonna get y'all the opportunity
to get your grades up.
I'm gonna get y'all the opportunity
to travel around the country and play football.
What they told me was that
they would be able to help me
get my ACT score up as well as get extra tape
to be able to attend college.
That dream would be incredibly powerful,
um, for those kids.
If you are maybe not good at school,
you're not-- just not that great at academics,
or maybe you are but you can't afford college.
Or maybe you just come from a rundown area
where college is not a likely option for you,
sports is the golden ticket.
Coach Roy had it down pat.
Flew me out. I'm in first-class.
He picked me up in this nice car.
We go eat in a nice restaurant. I'm like, "Man, this the life."
I'm seeing facilities, I'm seeing athletic trainers,
turf fields, jerseys, other players.
Man, like this program is finna be lit.
Like, we finna-- We finna tear some people up.
Come on, come on, come on. Go, go, go.
I used to drive around the neighborhoods to find kids.
I would just go into neighborhoods
and I'd look for what was familiar for me, right.
I need two telephone poles, a bunch kids doing football.
- Let's go recruit.
Hip-hop was so influential
on-- on-- on my pitch to talk to kids that, literally,
I would talk to them about recruiting football
and I would use Suge Knight's line,
because of what he said about Bad Boy.
Any artist out there wants to be an artist
and wanna stay a star...
You want to go to college?
If you don't want your coach all up on your Twitter...
...and don't have to worry about the executive producer
trying to be all in the video...
On your Instagram.
All on the record...
Talking about how he made you hot.
- Come to Death Row.
Come to Bishop Sycamore.
I literally took that from Suge.
And I literally applied it to these kids.
♪ (UPBEAT MUSIC PLAYING) ♪
I'm loving what I'm hearing.
"All right. Let me get back to you, Coach."
Hey, come on, Ma.
He was all excited.
He got off the phone, had me talk to Roy
and they told me,
"Hey, he's going to be put up in a-- an apartment.
We're going to take care of him."
I was focused on the school as well,
because he only had two credits left to graduate.
So I was super excited.
I was ready for him to go on to the next chapter.
Where there's no vision, the people perish.
You know what that means?
You have no idea?
There's no plan, this--
If you don't have the vision, you'll perish.
My first impression of Roy, um, awesome guy.
♪ (PENSIVE MUSIC PLAYING) ♪
He knew how to talk,
made you feel comfortable.
So he was a cool dude, most definitely.
I looked up to him because I felt like he was
a Black man in America actually trying a positive way.
He showed me enough to where I knew how to trust him.
Like, I can trust a coach where they come in clutch.
Like a-- It was like having an uncle on the field with you.
Like that-- like that big cool uncle.
It's like, he was just like one of us.
Talk about your coaching style.
Hold on a second.
Did you already speak to players?
Or am I getting the first shot to explain me as a coach?
No, you... you get the first shot.
Oh, I get the first shot, man. I'm just...
I'm an understanding coach, who, uh,
was out there embracing... Um...
♪ (PENSIVE MUSIC PLAYING) ♪
My style as a coach, I think I'm creative.
♪ You rollin' with me ♪
I'm passionate.
Go ahead, go ahead. Yeah.
I could tell you some stories that you would never believe...
...but I literally would say whatever I needed to say
to pull that dog up out you.
Anything.
What kind of coach was Roy?
Um...
Do you feel like Roy was like an actual coach?
I mean-- Okay. So my opinion of Roy is like...
I've done yelled, scream, motivate,
pull, tugged, hugged.
Made fun of kids, made fun of their situations.
Roy is...
not a coach.
♪ (DUBIOUS MUSIC PLAYING) ♪
It is a law that if you coach interscholastic activities
in the state of Ohio,
you have to have what's called a pupil activity permit.
Uh, it ensures that you're safe to be around kids
by having a background check.
Roy Johnson did not have one of those permits,
nor did he even ever apply for one.
We have no coach and we have no film sessions.
We didn't really have no plays.
In terms of the playbook...
Yeah, one of them stupid kids said--
One of those young men that I like, they was like,
"We got it off Madden."
Back to throw.
And he can't get a throw off. He's taken down!
I was like...
Well, one, I wasn't the offensive coordinator,
so, no, I didn't get it off Madden.
Like, once we've seen that he didn't care,
just a bunch of teenagers, like,
you think we gonna care that you're not making us run?
Oh, nobody's going to say, "Man, make us run." Like, we--
You know, at the time,
that would've been something that someone
should've stepped up and said,
"We need to have this type of structure."
But like, he doesn't-- he doesn't have any structure.
He's one-- He's real cool, laid-back.
But at the end of the day,
he's still going to be about money at all times.
I never thought that I'd be
in a situation where...
I, uh, would have enough money to rent an entire hotel.
As I dug into the case, I found
multiple unpaid parking tickets,
unpaid court costs,
unpaid business loans, unpaid tax liens.
Not a guy that really cares if someone's out to get him.
I don't feel like I went into any situation thinking like,
"Oh, I'm just not going to pay it
just because I don't want to pay it."
I think I went into the situation,
like, "Okay, I can swing it,
I can get it together," and then didn't pay it
because life happened for whatever reason.
Roy went to a paintball park
and left them a credit card, and said,
"The person responsible for this credit card
will come in to settle up our tab."
Then they left.
And the paintball company sort of waited and waited
and no one showed up.
When they ran the card, it bounced. It declined.
I just don't care to handle this small problem.
On my list of things to take care of,
a 300 dollar paintball bill wasn't it.
We get a comment on one of our Instagram posts
from that paintball park,
saying, "It's fucked up of you guys not to pay us."
Roy just said, "Don't answer that."
Yeah, he said, "Any bad press you get,
just don't answer them.
We want all this to be positive and, you know..."
Obviously, a positive narrative.
It's just what the man does.
Probably a six or seven-month period
that we were involved with COF Academy,
we probably made 50 or 60 bucks just through gas money.
- We split 60 dollars. - Yeah.
So 30 each.
For gas.
That's beyond-- That's a friendship,
that's beyond business.
Those guys, like, they're my friends.
Like, I know them.
I'm sorry.
Life happens.
They're going to get paid by me
when I get money together to move on.
He was like, "You know, JD,
I need you to go to this hotel for tonight.
And we're going to get everything situated
in the morning." Easy, bet.
The hotel was only like 32 dollars a night.
And keep that fact now.
First day we there...
Boom, boom, boom!
It was the lady from downstairs,
the hotel lady, and she was like,
"Can you tell Roy to come pay me?"
And it's like, man, like I'm seeing
they're not paying bills.
They say, "All right, if you need ten to 15 rooms,
you can pay it in either net 30, 60, or 90."
So I was like, "I can get this hotel room
and pay it in 90 days?" Shit.
What would you think I was gonna do?
They offered me credit and I took it.
To my knowledge,
Roy has... ...at least a dozen lawsuits against him.
♪ (PENSIVE MUSIC PLAYING) ♪
Obviously, you've had...
You've had a few lawsuits, right?
Is that fair to say? Over the years?
Yeah, I've had a few lawsuits over the years.
I think that's fair to say. The ones that you looked up.
How many do you reckon you had?
How many did you count?
Um... Over 30. - Thirty lawsuits?
Yeah, you've had over 30.
Um, I mean, it's pretty wild.
How come you've had so many lawsuits?
Because I didn't pay the bills.
Why didn't you pay the bills?
I don't know. Might've been I didn't have the money.
Didn't care.
Lazy, arrogance. There's a lot that goes into it.
I would literally have to look at all 30 lawsuits
and look down and look at 'em.
What does it feel like to be a co--
Well, actually, are you a con man?
No, that's not, like, my trade or profession.
Okay, okay, okay, okay. I'm-- No, you know, I'm dodging it.
- Roy is absolutely a con man. Is he any good at it?
That's a great question.
He's kind of good at it and kind of awful at it.
I'm not sure what the name of the television show is
exactly, but I think one of the terms is nigga-ish.
So I'm not a con man. I'm con man-ish.
- ♪ (GENTLE MUSIC PLAYING) ♪
Man, there's some hustles I could tell you about, man, that I did.
And that's what they were. They were hustles, man.
You know, I would call
a grocery store in the morning and say,
"Hey, I need to order 25 rotisserie chickens."
And they will order the 25 rotisserie chickens and cook them.
And then I wouldn't pick them up,
and then I would show up when the deli closed
like six, seven o'clock,
because I knew, at night, they would mark them down
to two dollars apiece.
But I didn't-- I mean, I didn't have a choice.
Where am I going to find food to feed 50 kids?
Originally, everything was supposed to be catered,
have all these meals and whatnot.
But we found out that it wasn't like that.
It seemed like these kids got fed,
but it was whenever Roy could make it happen.
When we first started,
we were usually getting fed pasta.
I was eating pizza and pasta every day.
The mac and cheese would get put out because nobody would eat it.
And then that same night, it's reheated
and it's there like four nights later.
I saw pictures that he would send me
and I'd be like...
-"What is that?" - It's not oatmeal. I don't know.
I don't even know what we ate that day.
Like, it was a porridge?
A whole bunch of food like mixed together,
- like, just try it out. - We out there playing football.
Ain't nobody really got any money or anything.
And where I'm from, it's only one way, so...
They going to Walmart, they stealing,
Kroger, stealing it.
There got a time we all got kicked out of Walmart
like none of us could go in there.
We had to steal TV dinners
and stuff like that, chicken and stuff.
With financial backing comes stability.
And once that didn't happen,
it was almost like they were on an island
by their self, surrounded by water.
And now you have to learn how to survive
or you have to learn how to, you know, do whatever you can
to get out of it, get off the island.
Coach Roy and Mr. Peterson told me that they would be able
to help me get my ACT score up as well as get extra tape.
Get to those colleges that I wanted to go to.
For the school, it's-- it's-- It began
with meeting the needs of those kids.
One, two, three...
To my understanding,
there were no educational standards.
They did not have teachers.
They did not provide any education themselves.
The school that we visited
months before we got there was not at all the school
that we, quote, unquote, "attended."
The school that we actually attended,
it was called YouthBuild.
In 2019, the first year of Bishop Sycamore,
they claimed that they were going to be
the athletic arm of YouthBuild.
It was a school for kids
that got locked up during high school
and kids that probably dropped out
and just wanted to get a GED.
Bishop Sycamore started running up bills
in YouthBuild's name, and expecting them to pay
for things that YouthBuild had not agreed to pay for.
And so almost as soon as it started,
the partnership was dissolved.
We never really had like a teacher
to help us for our ACT.
We really was pretty much on our own.
Coming in, I told him, "I need to move my GPA
from here to here."
You know, he told me, you know, "We have a trusted,
accredited source to bring your grades up."
And I said, "Okay, I'm gonna put all my marbles in one basket.
Imma trust you with this."
In its paperwork, it says students go to class
from 7:10 a.m. to 3:05 p.m.
at Franklin University's library.
We're supposed to be going to a school called Franklin University,
and Roy's telling us, "Okay, this is the building
where we'll be taking our classes at."
We get there and the doors are locked, we can't get in, so.
You guys never had any type of brick-and-mortar
school location in-- in the entire process?
No.
Look, you tell a teenager,
"You don't have to go to school anymore,"
they're not going to stop and say, "But wait a minute,
there are consequences to this." No. They're like, "Cool.
I don't have to go to school anymore."
They figured everything would be taken care of
because the grown folk on duty
said that everything would be taken care of.
Three games into the season
and we haven't touched a single academic assignment.
- We don't have any laptops.
We don't really have a solid place
for everyone to, um, everyone to do work.
There's no teachers.
So I'm kind of iffy about it,
but I don't want to go tell my mom.
I'm like, "Oh, I'm not doing school."
I don't necessarily think there was a gap
between what was promised and what was delivered. Um...
I-- I guess-- I guess in a way you could--
You-- You probably could say that, I guess.
If these were individuals who were under the age of 18,
you have a legal obligation
to provide them a very strict framework
and make sure that they're doing what they need to do
because they're not adults yet. The brain isn't fully formed.
But one of the things that Bishop Sycamore and COF Academy
would always dance around was the age of their players.
Notably, they filled out on their paperwork in 2020
that they had three students and in 2021 that they had one.
Now, obviously, there was more than three people
out on the football field.
So why weren't all these players on Bishop Sycamore
being considered truant?
The answer would be, if they were all
already out of school and over-aged.
I already graduated from high school. So, Coach Roy
trying to search up classes for us
at YouthBuild down in Columbus.
They tried to find us classes
so we could look like a real high school.
Roy would tell people,
"We-- we don't have graduates on our team,
we don't have players over 19 on our team.
We are just a high school like any other."
Hard work on three.
- One, two, three. Hard work!
There were remarks made at practice like,
"We're going to go out there
and play a bunch of 17 and 18-year-olds
and whoop the shit out of them."
Which kind of led you to believe that...
these kids might be grown men.
And, obviously, you know,
the way they look, they looked old.
You could definitely see it.
There were players with children,
one that just came out of jail.
Just something you can look at and see,
like, this isn't a high school program.
Ben Ferree said you guys had players who were too old?
- Mm-hmm? Junior college players
that were playing in your team, is that true?
It's not true. Ben Ferree doesn't know
what the hell he's talking about.
One that stands out to me
who did play for Bishop Sycamore in 2021,
his name is Mecose Todd.
He was listed as playing at a JuCo, a junior college.
He was listed at that college as a sophomore.
What are the odds that someone
two years removed from high school
is age-eligible for high school athletics still?
You know Mecose was already in JuCo.
And you know I played at JuCo. And you know this stuff.
When you're in JuCo,
you can't go back to high school. Like, that's--
that's basically your clock has already started.
It always felt like we were not supposed to be
doing things that we were doing.
Looking, looking, looking.
Gets hit from behind and sacked.
There are some big boys.
What do these kids eat?
I knew I wasn't eligible to play high school football.
But what he kind of made it seem like was that he had a prep team
as well as a high school team that was playing.
So our school was a hybrid of a high school-prep school.
I don't understand
how people just buy into that hook, line, and sinker.
There's no such thing
as a hybrid high school-prep team.
That does not exist.
If there's one prep school player on a team,
it is a prep school.
You're bringing 20, 21-year-olds out here
to compete against 15, 16, 17-year-olds.
Like, that is flatly wrong. But it's masked by the fact
that they weren't good. But there was still somebody
on the other side of this 20-year-old
who probably looked up
and was like, "Damn, that dude looks old."
The lie is when you tell people that you are a school,
and then when you compound on that lie
by saying "We are a high school."
What's the high school age limit?
Does anybody know?
Is there some type of organization
that says how old you have to be to play high school football?
Where's that manual? Does anybody have that?
In OHSAA regulations,
you can be 19 years old and play.
The day you turn 20, you are no longer eligible
to play high school athletics.
Cool. What's that have to do with us? We're not OHSAA.
So what are you talking about? What, to play with OHSAA school?
I'm not OHSAA. We weren't OHSAA.
There was nothing about us that was OHSAA.
I didn't belong to OHSAA, I wasn't a OHSAA member.
Everything about that organization
is just disgusting.
And then they run around and call themselves the state,
but they're not even governed by the state,
they're just an association.
Did I break a law? Is it illegal? Am I in jail?
Some things, there aren't laws against
because people lack the imagination that anyone
is unscrupulous enough to do them.
No, it's just Ben Ferree, OHSAA,
and what they thought is your opinion.
Roy, the issue is that you lie.
I think I'm the most honest liar that I know.
So if you ask me if I'm a liar, or have I lied?
Yeah, absolutely.
But I would tell you that.
My core value is loyalty.
So I wouldn't lie to somebody I'm loyal to.
Or more importantly, I don't think I would lie
to somebody who is loyal to me.
Roy will tell you he's a liar.
And then Roy will say, "I'm a liar.
So I know that I need to tell the truth about X, Y, Z,
because you'll just look into me because I'm a liar."
I will not lie about something I can prove.
I'm not going to tell you we did something and we didn't
- when I can prove it. - But you're comfortable to lie
about things that can't be proven.
Yes.
My name is Joe Maimone.
I'm a matchmaker to the top teams in America
in the world of high school football.
I had heard of Bishop Sycamore,
just from being in the business.
Roy called me, we started talking.
He told me, "I want to assemble the best schedule
in the history of high school football."
They didn't care about winning or losing.
They just wanted to experience playing the best.
Play against good teams,
that gives you good varsity film.
Big throw from Harris.
- Caught at the end zone!
On one level, you can be a coach that says,
"I want my kids to compete against the best of the best."
But the adults in the room
are the ones who have to look around and say,
"Nah, we don't need to do that."
And you can do that in basketball
or chess or something else
that doesn't involve getting hit in the kidneys.
Like in this-- this-- There are different consequences to this.
IMG is one of the toughest teams in America to schedule for,
because of how good they are.
So I surround myself with those type of clients
who want to play the IMGs of the world.
Even though you lose to IMG, if you're playing well
against one of their top players,
that can get you a scholarship somewhere.
The exposure helps.
The only thing is, if you're not that good,
exposure means getting exposed.
Do you know why IMG played us in the Canton Hall of Fame?
Because nobody else in Ohio wanted to play them.
They think it's a finesse thing, right?
"How did you finesse your way onto ESPN?"
I didn't. They called us.
After assembling Bishop Sycamore's
2021 schedule,
it was ranked the fourth toughest schedule in America.
Not only were they playing IMG,
they were playing a team from Texas,
they were playing a team from Las Vegas,
they were going down to Maryland.
It was a great schedule,
one of the best I've ever put together for any team.
We're on ESPN...
playing at the Canton Hall of Fame.
Win, lose, or draw, we win.
We're there. We win.
I love it when a plan comes together.
The first game of the season
- was at Archbishop Hoban.
Harris looking under pressure.
Scrambles and dropped down at about the 45.
They're a really good team.
They've had about four or five state championships.
There I'm playing against the top programs in the country.
Let's go.
The second game on my schedule is IMG.
It was an opportunity for me against IMG
to go in there and showcase who I really am.
But the week of, Roy tells us we got another game on Friday.
He's like, "Yeah, we're gonna take this game
to get prepared for IMG.
They had scheduled individually, on their own,
the Pennsylvania team on Friday.
This to me was one of the craziest things to come of this.
It was finding out
that they had played two football games
in a span of three days.
Had no idea about it
and would definitely would have talked them out of it
or let them know my feelings, uh, not to do it.
Especially when you're playing a top-five team in America
48 hours later.
Welcome to the Woodland Hills Showcase.
Tonight's first matchup is going to be
Bishop Sycamore versus Sto-Rox.
Every single snap, you are ramming your body
into somebody else,
and you're doing that a hundred times a game.
Bishop Sycamore comes out
being led by their quarterback, Trilian Harris.
Teams are playing two games within one week,
but not Friday, Sunday.
Not that small a window.
You need time to recuperate from one game to play the other.
I've been around the game a long time
and I've never witnessed a team
that played two games back-to-back.
Shotgun formation.
Harris gets the snap. He's under pressure.
And he's taken down!
You wanna know what that feels like?
Go run into a wall 30 times
and then come back two days later
and say, "Yeah, I'll do that again."
Except this time, against a much sturdier wall.
If it was such a big concern that they should only play
one game per week,
then you should make that a national law and rule,
the health people should come in and say all that,
and guess what I would do?
"Hey, bro, we can't play these two games.
We can't do that, because it's against the law."
But they didn't make it illegal, so we played the game.
There's no law saying you can't play football games
within 48 hours of each other.
There's no law saying you can't,
you know, drive a nail into your leg.
People just don't do it
because it's stupid and unhealthy.
You could not demonstrate less of a regard
for the safety of your players
than having them play two tackle football games
in a span of three days.
People were sharing helmets
because we were lied to,
saying that we had, um, equipment on the way.
Trilian had to wear his helmet
that he had in high school that I bought him,
that I know it wasn't registered,
and it wasn't a certified helmet for this season.
And his helmet comes off!
I can't believe this happened again.
Uh, were players sharing helmets? Yes.
Is that dangerous?
Football is dangerous. Yeah.
And that'll just about do it here.
The Sto-Rox Vikings come out and get a victory
against Bishop Sycamore.
There weren't safety concerns
because there just wasn't anyone paying attention.
There wasn't enough eyeballs on it.
When it's on ESPN and... and you have
millions of people seeing the horrible situation,
then it gets a little more spotlight on it.
Welcome to Canton, Ohio,
home to the Pro Football Hall of Fame.
IMG Academy out of Florida, a powerhouse,
against Bishop Sycamore from Ohio.
And all of a sudden, we see that Bishop Sycamore
has scheduled IMG Academy at Hall of Fame Stadium on ESPN.
Dude, we can't miss that.
That's Roy Johnson's idea coming to fruition.
What if they're good?
I was sitting at home, I was like,
"I'm gonna binge-watch something."
I made me some lemonade, got my cookies on deck.
And then all of a sudden, I saw Roy drinking the water.
And I'm telling you, I dropped my cookies
and the first words I... I yelled at my wife,
"Hey, man, the clown's on TV doing this thing."
Roy Johnson, the head coach
for Bishop Sycamore,
they're a bit of a mystery in this game.
Roy, how did you pull this off? I don't know.
I don't know how you did it, but, like, it was amazing.
You watch them growing up.
Like, everybody watches the IMG Academy growing up.
So you know you're playing against the best school in the nation.
So it was definitely surreal.
I was happy for Roy.
I was happy for the boys, happy for the coaches.
So, it was like-- It was emotional.
Like, I remember coming out of the tunnel.
Before I got to the tunnel, my wife looked at me
and I just-- and I just burst into tears.
Trilian was extremely excited. That's all he could talk about.
That's all he could post on Twitter.
It's what we do from the West to the Midwest.
So, we're going up, baby.
Let's turn this up. You see the one-three.
Let's fuckin' go!
The day IMG game, waking up. It's a lot of nerves.
So I said a prayer and I went to the mirror.
I'm looking. I'm-- You know, my eyes is getting watery.
I'm looking. I'm like,
"It's the biggest day of your life, bruh."
Let's go!
The day of competition is a big deal.
Now, you take this and you make it teenagers,
and you tell them that they are being put
on the most important stage in American life.
Television.
I'm so hyped right now.
Just imagine all the emotions
that come up with that, because TV confers
an authority in this country.
Be legendary on me. Be legendary on three.
One, two, three!
Bishop Sycamore will kick it off
and IMG Academy will receive.
Going to the game, I think everybody thought
we had a big chance of winning.
Like, everybody's hopes were high.
You don't go into this game thinking that you can't win.
I've never thought that we couldn't win.
He honestly and truthfully thought
that we were gonna go into the IMG game
and stand a chance.
How likely is it they could have beaten IMG?
They hadn't won a game in two years
and now they were gonna fight the champ.
End zone.
Hauled in by Tate with one hand.
I'm playing against one of the top programs
in the country.
And now if I beat them, I'm the man, you know?
If I beat them, I'm a dog out here, man.
I'm gonna get the most respect out here.
I saw that as a chance, like, to really prove myself
that I'm that dude.
It's my only shot, for real. This is my chance.
First time we get to see this offense.
Trilian Harris is their quarterback.
History is written by the winners.
It's not written by the losers.
On second and nine.
Harris gets rid of it, completes near sideline.
If we win, sponsors are different,
signing day is different. People congratulating us.
Fourth and one from inside its own 30.
Bishop Sycamore will go for it.
If you hear Roy Johnson just beat IMG Academy,
now my school automatically is the top school.
And IMG will take over. The ball comes out.
It's gonna be a tall order
for this Bishop Sycamore offensive line
to hold up throughout the course of four quarters.
If Bishop Sycamore had beaten IMG Academy,
it would have been the proudest moment
of Roy Johnson's life.
ESPN would be running around like,
"We had this flagship team that we brought on."
Underdogs and all that. Yeah.
New York Times is talking about Roy Johnson, the genius.
"Look how he's helped these kids recover."
But that definitely didn't happen.
Low throw. It's caught.
And reaching across the goal line,
it's Carnell Tate.
The injured player
for Bishop Sycamore is number 54.
We do not have a 54 on the roster we were given.
Safety comes first with football,
but we didn't have any trainers.
Actually, the IMG game, my mom was the trainer.
One of the staff members from the stadium came in
and he was like, "Where are your trainers?"
I said, "I am the trainer."
And he was like, "What?
They're supposed to be supplied.
They were supposed to get somebody out here,
you know, if somebody got injured."
And I was like, "Well, that didn't happen."
First ten minutes of the game,
one of the kids tore his ACL. It was a bad knee injury
and Roy was just out there with some of the coaches.
No medical staff, nobody out there.
A red zone chance for IMG.
Still fighting into the end zone
from 12 yards out.
This is throwing a bantamweight
with just a few fights under its belt
into the ring against essentially
your heavyweight champion.
At that moment, I was extremely concerned.
From the 15, Harris will throw. Backpedaling.
Jihaad Campbell gets the sack.
And Trilian Harris, the quarterback
for Bishop Sycamore, limping on the sideline.
I'm gonna sit back there
and take them hits,
but I'm gonna get back up. I'm gonna get back up.
I'm gonna keep playin'. Play me. I don't give a fuck.
I don't care.
'Cause in that moment, I'm like, "Bro, I can't go out like this.
I can't."
And I want college coaches to know that,
okay, at least he a dog.
Harris heaves it down field.
Incomplete.
As I was throwing the ball,
my arm came up and my shoulder came down.
I felt the pop. So I'm dangling my arm.
You can tell. Like, you know, you can tell it that I'm hurt.
End of the second quarter,
Trilian goes up for a pass.
The linebacker came and hit him in his shoulder.
As he was off the field, he threw his helmet.
He, you know, was like, "I'm good. I'm good.
I'm going back in the game, I'm going back in the game."
I was like, "No, you're not."
I don't care if we got whooped a hundred to zero.
All I know is I wanted to go out fighting as a dog.
The coaches, of course, let him go back in.
I was like, "He is not going back in this game."
We get a new quarterback here,
- Isaiah Booker.
He's listed as a receiver
or a defensive back on the roster.
Right. Not even listed as a quarterback.
My backup, he broke his ankle.
But we are seeing Isaiah Booker here.
He is under pressure and gobbled up.
The inherent danger right now.
That looked like a young man
not prepared to face this kind of a defense.
The thing about watching football is
you recognize there's a chance
that somebody is going to be hurt.
But when you watch one team just be physically superior
in every way to another team,
and it's clear that that team can't compete,
you felt like the referee should have been coming in
or somebody should've thrown in a towel and said,
"Hey, man, this is enough.
Our guys can't do it."
Now, it's on the coaches.
You know, you say you care about us, but did you really?
I go to the sideline, tell the coach,
"I felt my knee pop."
"If it ain't hurting, you good."
So, I go back out there.
Then come to find out I tore my ACL.
I'm telling him, "It popped."
Not one coach said, "Don't go back out there."
It was disgusting.
I was literally sick to my stomach watching it.
Driven hard out of bounds.
Quarter number two comes to an end.
Halftime came
and he literally cussed the kids out.
We come in at halftime. My phone is blowing up.
Fake school this. Fake school that.
I got over a thousand messages in my requests.
I'm thinking to myself, like, man, it's halftime.
We will have a running clock
here in the third quarter.
IMG to kick off to Bishop Sycamore.
There were media outlets that I had reached out to
telling them, "This is a fake school.
You need to cover this,"
that just completely blew me off
and said, "No, we're not running a story on it."
Gage reaching and he is in.
So to see it go viral simply because it existed on ESPN
when they could have run that story any time
in the last three years.
That was just like, "Go fuck yourself."
Trending on Twitter, seeing my name,
you know, it hurt.
Grown men tweeting my son that he should go kill himself.
He is never gonna be shit.
Like, "You suck.
You're a Bishop Sycamore quarterback."
Jonathan Mambila in there now at quarterback.
Also listed as a defensive back wide receiver.
Too high, tipped, intercepted.
People got the narrative
that I'm a grown man.
People got the narrative that I'm a JuCo dropout.
These are grown-ass men losing
to fucking high schoolers.
Hill handed off. It's Gage and he'll waltz in.
You 20 years old, 21,
and you playing high school kids,
they smacking you around on the field?
Man, get out of here with that nonsense!
This is not a representation
or a microcosm in any way, shape, or form
of Ohio High School Football.
It takes a lot for a broadcast crew
to be critical of what they are seeing in real time.
Nobody knows who Bishop Sycamore is.
The last thing you want
is to have this be representative of the image
your program projects going forward.
It had to be so transparently fraudulent
that people who were on the payroll
to promote this event could not keep up the story.
They get it right back. Makes it a pick six.
I would be stunned if Bishop Sycamore ever plays
another football game.
And that will do it.
The absurdity kept stacking and stacking and stacking,
and it couldn't have possibly been funnier.
If I was a viewer, I'm clowning me.
Like I'm-- I'm-- I'm clowning me.
And then we found out what this meant to the kids.
I'm not even Adrian Brown.
People see me as Bishop Sycamore,
the fake school.
Y'all are gonna be clowned forever.
What amazes me about this particular con
is the dream for this con was for everybody to see it.
The fallout after the team's
blowout loss continues.
Who is this team?
What sort of education are these players getting?
And it will be interesting to see
if there's a criminal investigation.
- Maybe from a fraud standpoint. Yeah.
Were they raising money under false pretenses
and not delivering it?
Now, we can tell you they have fired
their head coach.
Teams scheduled to play Bishop Sycamore
canceled their games
following last week's televised loss.
The Fairfield Inn & Suites
in Canton alleged
that the team used counterfeit checks to pay
for its stay during its matchup against IMG Academy.
♪ (SOFT MUSIC PLAYING) ♪
The day before the IMG and Bishop Sycamore game,
Roy asked me to pick him up.
He needed to go get a check, which in my mind is like,
okay, you're gonna go to the bank.
He's like, "No, let's stop over at Kinko's."
I'm like, "That's weird," 'cause that's just printing.
And he told me in my ear when he did this
that it was a hot check
and that it was going to pay for the hotel
through Education Resource.
Education Resource was what his mom created.
It was a nonprofit organization.
But she passed away,
so he gained control of the business.
And I was like, "So you're printing off a check?"
He was like, "Yeah, we have to print off a check
to give to the hotel."
He was like, "Oh, no. It's good. It's good.
It'll get taken care of. I just...
We'll just have to move money around,
but these are gonna bounce."
I'm like, "Well, I don't wanna be a part of that."
Did you print fake checks
- to pay the hotel in, uh... - Canton, Ohio?
Canton, Ohio? - No.
What were you printing at Kinko's then?
At Kinko's?
It was the... That's like the account numbers
for the account that we had.
You put it on the check and then pay them.
But we ended up paying with credit card.
They needed something to hold it.
We know the checks didn't go through.
- That's what we know. - It's not attempted fraud.
The account was valid, there's money in the account.
- They know that. They never had a bad check.
And I don't know who told you about Kinko's,
'cause that's not right either.
There's no doubt in my mind
that Roy knowingly bounced those checks.
Anything that Roy could not pay, he did not pay.
A lawsuit alleged Coach Roy Johnson owed
110,000 dollars in hotel fees
at this Baymont Inn.
I think every place the team stayed at,
where you would have to pay money to stay,
they were evicted from.
We would move the kids in
and get the first two months free,
whatever it is.
And then, you know, you're thinking that
by that time that you would have the funding coming in
to continue that.
Getting evicted three months in is about as quick
as you can get evicted. That means you never paid
a single bill.
Hey, we can go to these places and live there for three months
and not have to pay a dime.
And that's about the length of the football season.
Then we're out of there. And that's what they did.
Roy told everybody, "This the end of the season.
We got like two days to get out."
I walked past the front desk lady
after I packed my things up. And she's like,
"Do you know why you guys are getting kicked out?"
And then she was like, "He hasn't paid."
Since like we literally first got there.
Uh, home. Everybody went home.
Some of these evictions are in these kids' names.
That's something on your record as an individual
that could affect your credit,
that could affect your ability to get financing in the future,
that could affect your ability on where you can live,
what kind of apartments you can rent in the future.
I know about the eviction thing. I know about that.
Because after they all moved out,
we didn't pay for the next month
and so they had to file an eviction.
That's just how the process works.
You had dealt with them.
You made sure that they were cool.
- Yeah, they were-- Yeah-- They were situated after that.
Yeah, they were situated home.
They were taken care of. - And they were taken care of.
Yeah, the eviction didn't happen till after. Yeah.
Me getting evicted with the eviction notice on the door,
it was more so like, "We're getting kicked out,
what we gonna do?"
I didn't know the eviction was on my record
till my mom told me. She starts yellin' at me.
I'm like, "What are you yellin' at me for?
I don't know what you're talking about."
And then you had to get a-- Mr. Peterson got an attorney.
The attorney went to court, dealt with the court situation,
and then we moved on.
He had a lawyer.
Bishop Sycamore, rather, had a lawyer to help them
with the eviction cases.
That lawyer then had to turn around and sue them
for not paying him
for helping them in the eviction cases!
He would try to be buddy-buddy with the kids,
telling them things that he does,
making it seem like it's okay
to get away with that type of stuff.
Coach Roy made it feel like it was okay to be a criminal.
Like as long as we was gettin' this money.
Like, we getting this money by any means.
Like, that's the thing. By any means.
Ask him.
Ask him!
Come on, bro. You don't care about us, really.
You care about money.
This man was telling kids that you gotta pay
a mandatory fee to attend this school.
The cost was approximately 12,000.
Yeah, to this day, I'm still receiving an invoice
from Bishop Sycamore,
and it's from Education Resource.
Kids and their parents called
and told Coach Roy
that we don't have the money for this.
And Coach Roy literally said, "I can help you with that.
Take out a loan."
Roy pressured the kids into doing PPP loans,
and it made it seem that the money was gonna go
towards tuition.
So now they're thinking
this is like a grant or something.
And the whole time, it's just nothing but a loan.
If you don't do this, how else are you gonna cover
a 16,000-dollar tuition being an 18-year-old
unemployed student athlete?
They don't understand that, okay, you do this loan,
this gonna go and hit your credit.
They're just understanding that 50 people wanna get D1,
50 people wanna go play football.
But 50 people also got told,
"Well, this is the only way that can happen."
The first day, the parents were gone.
It was just us and the coaches.
We had to sign a paper with our information.
We signed our names, gave our address
and we signed our Social.
After I signed it, I immediately called my dad
just to get his take on it and to see what he had to say,
and he was kind of upset with me.
And what he told me was to just immediately get them,
get the paper and discard it, or have them discard it.
What did they say? - They said that, uh,
they said that they discarded it,
got rid of it.
Have you given other people
- your Social Security number? - No.
Did you take out two PPP loans
for 20,833 dollars?
No, I don't-- I didn't--
I don't know anything about that.
I ain't taken out no loans.
I didn't get any PPP loans. We didn't get any PB loans.
The school didn't get 100,000 dollars,
500,000 dollars, and we just had it anywhere.
That did not happen. I would not tell 40, 30, 20 kids
to all take out PPP loans
from the United States government.
I don't even trust the United States government.
They were just on my ass.
With Coach Roy, he's smart.
He-- He'll play you so dumb to your face
to the point where you will think
he's dumbfounded to the situation.
But don't do it because he's smart.
Like, he's smart. Real smart. He'll play you.
Legally, I did not commit any fraud.
I just hang out in the gray.
What do they call me? Loophole Leroy?
- ♪ (LOW MUSIC PLAYING) ♪
So one morning, the sun barely coming up.
There's five geese on the road.
This man goes full speed...
...and ran the geese over with no remorse.
Did you ever run over a gaggle of geese?
- Yeah. Oh, you did?
Mm-hm. Yes, it was a geese.
But I guess, because there were multiple there,
that would be considered
running over multiple geese, yes.
This man says, "I gotta show you niggas
what it's like to go to war.
It ain't nothing like the smell of fresh blood in the morning."
What happened is, it was by accident.
But then after I ran it over,
then I had to make a joke about it.
And he reverses full speed.
Like, if you do that to some birds...
and then you justify it by saying that,
imagine what else you would do. Imagine what you're capable of.
♪ (OMINOUS MUSIC PLAYING) ♪
Early on in the season,
we came out for practice one morning...
and then there's a homeless man
like trying to get into Roy's car.
So when I walk out the front of the building,
my car door is open and somebody's in it,
like, you know, looking for something, whatever.
This person looks up. And when I look up,
it's not a player. It's just some guy.
So I was like, "Yo!"
This guy had my cell phone, my wallet, my stuff.
So he turns around
and I was like, "Bruh, you don't want this."
'Cause at this point, now a bunch of players were in it.
I told the team
the reason he's acting like this...
is because he never had a dad whoop his ass.
And then he took his belt off.
He literally whipped him with the belt.
The homeless dude with the belt.
- I just started smacking him
on his butt until he gave me my stuff.
And I think he by accident, 'cause he maybe turned,
got hit, like, you know, on the arm and the face, but...
That went on for like a little, probably five minutes,
and then everybody on the team just got licks in.
The homeless guy, after the fight, he walked away
with his, like, holding his ribs.
Like, he didn't have his bike anymore
'cause they broke his bike.
And the police show up, and they're like,
"What happened, what's going on?"
And he's laying there and he's like...
"I knew I shouldn't have broke in his car and took his stuff.
But they shouldn't--
They shouldn't have done me like that.
There was like a hundred of them.
A hundred of them!"
And I was-- I was just like-- I would never get involved
in anything like that. So I was kinda like
standing there as a bystander.
I'm like, "This is not where I wanna be at all."
And I was like-- I was just shook.
My son called me, and he said, "Mom, I wanna come home."
He was really adamant, like, "I wanna come home."
So when they were taking him in,
'cause he said he had to go to the hospital, he was like,
"Am I gonna get pain meds for this?"
All my kids are in college,
but I got one kid staying at home
'cause he doesn't trust men,
he can't play football,
he can't do anything 'cause you fucked him up.
You royally fucked my kid up.
- ♪ (MUSIC FADES) ♪
There's a lot of anger in me.
Insecurity, fear, and hurt comes out as anger.
I don't want people to see me upset
or I don't want people to know that I'm scared,
so you come out with anger.
And it's not really the anger that gets me in trouble.
It's the aggression that comes out of it.
That "fold 'em" side of me never comes out.
And what I mean by a "fold 'em" side,
you've gotta know when to hold 'em,
know when to fold 'em,
know when to walk away, know when to run.
Fold 'em, walk away, run, not in my DNA.
Good morning, Mr. Johnson.
You are charged with domestic violence,
which alleges that you did knowingly cause physical harm
to a family or household member.
So, one of the-- the-- the things we didn't talk about
the last time you were here
that we feel like we have to address
is the domestic abuse warrant
that you had out for your arrest during the IMG game.
- Mm-hmm. - ♪ (SOFT MUSIC PLAYING) ♪
Can you explain that situation to us?
I had a charge with domestic violence.
I was supposed to go to therapy for it.
I went to therapy,
I didn't complete the therapy, and there was a warrant issued.
These are serious allegations, obviously.
The victim did suffer visible injuries
from this incident.
She had a busted lip and there was blood on her chin
when officers arrived.
Did you ever hit her? - No.
I lived with Coach Roy for about four months.
I saw him on a weekly basis get violent with his girlfriend.
And on a daily, he got verbally abusive with her.
On a daily.
Why would people say
you were physically abusive if you weren't?
I don't know.
So, in my head, when you say physically abusive,
I never smacked her, I never grabbed her by the head,
threw her against the wall, never any of that. So...
Especially in front of the players.
I wanna say my second week there,
I hear him and Miss Ashley arguing.
I just so happened to look up.
He slaps Miss Ashley,
"You stupid bitch! Look-- Look what you made me do
in front of my players."
- We get in the car...
And he's laughing about it, like, "Yeah, man.
Look what I had to do to her.
Look what she made me do."
The victim has also indicated that she ended up
in the hospital last week due to the defendant's actions,
although he took her to the hospital
and told her to tell them
that she, I think, fell off a ladder.
How would I have responded if my daughter came home
and said that situation happened, right?
'Cause that's really what it boils down to.
I'd have whooped his ass.
Would I send my kids to a school
if I knew the principal had a domestic violence charge? No.
Simple as that.
So, you know, there are some titles in society
that confer authority upon you.
Once you're a doctor, you're not Mr. or Mrs.
or Miss anymore, you're Dr.
That's the title that we refer to you by always.
And "Coach" is that same way.
Like that, in this society, is seen as somebody
who is a leader of men
and someone who is supposed to guide young men
and make them better and teach them
all of these values.
And that's what all these kids were told.
And then they ultimately see Coach
beating up his girlfriend in front of them.
They ultimately find out that Coach is a con man.
I saw an opportunity that I thought could change my life,
and once I really, you know, figured out
that they couldn't help me and they're wasting my time,
that kind of...
That hurt me, like, in a dramatic way.
I was feeling sick.
Um, feeling very sick when it fell apart.
Feeling hurt. Um, asking why.
Well, I told my mom,
"I don't even wanna be here no more."
You know, I was losing everything.
I know what hurt is. I know what depression is.
I was lost, you know? What's my next move?
When Trilian wanted to kill himself,
I was just thinking about how many other kids
are out there feeling the same way.
How do I tell my momma that like,
"Mom, I'm at a school where a coach wants me
to do the same illegal stuff
that you tried to get me away from"?
It was over for me with football and just school in general.
I just... After I left, I was...
I was pretty much just done, like, with everything.
That took me to a...
very dark place.
If I didn't go to Bishop Sycamore...
I'd be showing my ass at college right now...
ballin', as we're speaking.
I'll still be having some pain in my lower back,
so I just deal with it.
I feel like they left me with a permanent injury.
I do regret going to Bishop Sycamore. I do.
I tried to take this opportunity as far as I can go.
And this has really just broken me
all the way down.
All the way.
I need a second, I'm crying and shit.
Shit hard.
I swear I never cried in my life.
I'll call my mom right now.
Fuck.
I tried to make a better life for my family.
I can't do it now.
How can you do that to kids?
Take them from their parents and destroy their dream.
How can you do that?
How?
Coach Roy is evil.
This man told me, all I gotta do is play football...
to obtain my dream.
The whole time, he tellin' me that
just so he could benefit off of it.
That's evil.
How do you respond to that?
Can we take a break? Please.
Sure. - That's some fucking bullshit.
These motherfuckers, man.
Bruh, Pahokee?
How many tourneys we paid for you?
Oklahoma just literally hit us up, man, about him.
And I said-- I said, Pahokee-- See, here's what I don't like.
What I don't like, in trying to develop this,
is that everything is cool.
I get where you're coming from.
But, dawg, y'all had problems with doing us this stuff,
and we'd clean it up for you, we take it up for you.
When you talk about Pahokee...
I can't even explain to you the things
that we did for Pahokee.
Man, ain't nobody recovering from that.
I'm telling you why they're not gonna recover from that.
'Cause it's not about recovering.
It's about recovering because I gotta do that
for my son and my family, because--
Bruh, I don't need to recover
from something I didn't do.
Regardless of whatever people say,
you always desire to be liked.
You always desire to-- The same way you feel
about somebody,
they feel about you the same way.
And I think that's part of the struggle, is...
those kids know that I would do anything for them.
So now that you fucked up and you coming here,
you need the opportunity, you get it.
Yeah, the ESPN shit messed up so that's why you didn't get it.
All right, Pahokee, I get it. But you, Pahokee,
he only care about himself?
If I only cared about myself, why'd I spend all that money
on clothes and food and flying them
all over the place, sending them to camps, all this,
paying for attorneys and all that,
if I only care about myself? What's my benefit from that?
- And then I-- - And you got screwed on in IMG.
And-- And--
Regardless of whatever happens,
you know, we still would do whatever we can.
Zyshaun... Zyshaun knows.
Like we're still trying to get Zyshaun
- in a school somewhere. - Bruh, it is not--
There's no way to win it.
Roy, what did you do wrong? What would you change?
I should've sent y'all home. I was dumb.
I was egotistical. I thought I could actually do it.
I got too emotionally wrapped up.
I thought I could pull it. And I did and I didn't.
Because I did that, I dragged you into something.
I should've sent you home.
The minute the church said it was over with,
I should've walked away.
That's what I should've done. Should've shut it down.
♪ (SOFT MUSIC PLAYING) ♪
I don't think that he could have
possibly let them down any more
had he been in their lives in any other capacity
short of being their fathers.
Because the coach is seen as another father.
And that's what he exploited.
He exploited the goodwill that comes from the expectation
that this is a person who's here to make young men better.
But that's not what they got. They got him, right?
They got his pursuit of profit.
They got his pursuit of glory.
How do you justify doing it for the kids
when almost every kid we talked to
said it just broke him?
So, there's that part of me that wants to go,
"You entitled, selfish, lying-ass niggas!"
I saved you a year. Guess why you were coming there?
Because you didn't have a college to go to anyway.
That's why you came.
So because you had nowhere to go, you came.
And you came to get that extra year.
It served its purpose. It gave you a chance to do that.
How did I dash your dream?
How did I keep you from going anywhere?
You still went to college.
♪ (HOPEFUL MUSIC PLAYING) ♪
From the time Bishop Sycamore ended,
I flew back to Texas.
And then as I was in Texas, I was just training every day
and seeing my family, being around friends.
But just training, make sure I was always on top.
I was thinking, anything could happen,
so just train, keep training, never settle.
So one of my trainers I was training with,
he got me in contact with Grambling State.
Grambling State is known for being an all-Black college,
um, but also the coaches there...
You have Hue Jackson that coached in the NFL.
Hue Jackson is the former head coach
of the Oakland Raiders and the Cleveland Browns
and has a great reputation in the NFL
for working with quarterbacks.
He is one of those guys.
You want your quarterback to get better?
You call Hue Jackson.
So for Trilian,
perfect person for him to play for.
Hue, you know, loved him.
He said he loves your size. He loves your ability.
He loves the way that you think as a quarterback.
So, Trilian got the phone call.
And I was in a whole other room
and all I hear him doing is screaming.
Hey, no. On God. I'm committing!
What? What? What?
Then he was like, "I got the offer.
I got the offer." I was like, "What offer?"
He's like, "To Grambling State."
I'm like, "You're freaking kidding me."
I'm committed now, dude. What you mean?
I want him to go to a HBCU.
Hey, I'm-- Oh, I'm committed now!
I felt that I'm living my dream, you know?
Like even though I'm not there yet,
I'm living my dreams.
I was very excited.
And so that's why I got these tears coming out
'cause, you know, I knew I have...
I can make it at a HBCU.
♪ ("ME OR SUM" BY NARDO WICK PLAYS) ♪
♪ Now she think she me or sum ♪
Let's ride, let's get it and let's go, you know? So...
I cried. It's gonna make me cry now...
Um, 'cause it's not happening.
So...
♪ (HOPEFUL MUSIC STOPS) ♪
As soon as they found out about, you know,
Bishop Sycamore, everything went left.
♪ (SOMBER MUSIC PLAYING) ♪
And as soon as I thought
that I was actually happy,
I found out my Grambling offer got taken away
because I went to Bishop Sycamore.
He basically said,
you know, that we are not gonna be able to enroll you
into Grambling because it wasn't even a real school.
We're talking about Grambling
and now we're talking about a player
who spent a year at a school that did not exist.
They don't have the manpower and the money to do everything
that would have been necessary
in order to get that young man in school.
And that's the tragic irony of it all.
It might have been the perfect place for him,
but probably doesn't have the access
to the resources necessary
to help somebody who needed what he needed
to get past the NCAA.
So, of course, we're devastated. Start crying.
Trilian's like... He wanna give up.
I broke down. Broke down. I went to the room.
I broke down crying.
I'm supposed to be living my dream.
You know, I was supposed to be the one
to show the little homies
that whatever you go through, you can make it.
You feel me? You can go D1.
To Roy, it's basically a fuck you.
You feel me?
And I'm gonna say it on camera. It's a fuck you.
I think race plays an important role in this story.
The fact that the players are Black
is the reason why somebody like Roy Johnson
would think that he could get away with this.
I don't view this in the way a lot of other people do
and say, "Man, how could you do this to your people?"
He did that to his people
because that's who you can do this to.
Black players are the commodity in athletics.
They are the prize that everybody wants
and they are also the least respected people
in the whole process.
So, yeah, he was going to do this
to Black people.
An update tonight on the Bishop Sycamore High School controversy.
So, in spite of what had been happening
at Bishop Sycamore and just who they were,
it took the ESPN game
for the state of Ohio to care at all.
Now Governor DeWine is calling for an investigation
into Bishop Sycamore.
The state of Ohio was embarrassed by this
because this happened on their watch.
And so the governor, Mike DeWine,
has an investigation into this one school.
What I hope comes out of the investigation
is the truth.
Uh, there's a story here
and it doesn't sound like a very pretty story.
They produce a 79-page document
that says Bishop Sycamore is a scam
and that it's not a real school at all.
They call the thing explicitly a scam,
and then said they couldn't do a damn thing about it.
As it turns out, there's no law saying
you can't run a fake school.
This report doesn't do anything to prevent them
from playing football in the future.
It doesn't make anything they have done illegal.
It doesn't send anyone to jail or accuse anyone of any crimes.
It basically just scolds them for 79 pages.
How is it that not one person was like,
"Hey, we need to put a law in here to say
that you can't make up a school."
And the answer is very simple.
Nobody thought anybody would make up a school.
Who would do such a thing?
All they could do was shrug their shoulders
and be like, "Man, that's fucked up."
So what's the difference between a school
like IMG Academy
and a school like Bishop Sycamore?
Ultimately, they all have the same purpose,
which is to be a place
that high school football players go
to play football,
and if they go to school in the meantime, that's fine.
Bishop Sycamore just skipped the part
where they make the kids go to class or do their work.
There are a lot of schools in the nation
that put football first.
Some of them do it a bit more reputably.
Some of them are legitimately providing
an opportunity for kids who otherwise wouldn't have it.
So what you wind up with is a school
that has very good teachers and everything else,
but that is there to supplement the athletic programs
rather than the athletic programs
being a supplement to the school.
Bishop Sycamore is just the most extreme example of that,
where the academics was a lie.
Football transcends sports.
Football is the reason that I'm here.
I'm not here for education.
It's not about education. It's about football.
Especially in Ohio.
They did an 80-page investigative report.
Seventy percent of it was talking about football.
There you go, Mando. Oh, yeah! Look at him work.
There you go, Mando. Almost there.
Good work.
And fortunately for me,
unfortunately for a lot of students,
there'll be more kids next year that need an opportunity
to take an online class to get their grades up
and to play football.
So there's gonna be another Bishop Sycamore.
There's other people that have started charter schools.
But the reality of it is this.
Is that the reason why I'm sitting in this chair
is because we played the number one team
in the country on national TV.
That opportunity wasn't provided to us
because I'm so smart.
That opportunity was provided to us
because the system sucks.
And it's like, people looking like,
"Oh, I can't believe this, it's not fair,
they're cheating."
No, I'm not, I'm just following the rules.
You wrote the rules.
I don't have the power to write the rules.
Bishop Sycamore is just a name.
The concept is not going anywhere.
Our frustration needs to be directed
towards something larger, because it's really easy
to pick out the Roy Johnsons of the world
and then say, "Hey, you are the problem."
But he's not the problem.
He is definitely more of a symptom.
And we need to take a real, honest accounting
of whether people should be making
this much money off of kids.
If we're gonna get to the point where we,
as a state or a country,
can actually punish people
who do something like what Bishop Sycamore did,
that means we have to reckon with what's going on
at these other schools.
But as long as the money machine is churning, like,
no one really is interested in any of that.
A lot of people in a lot of institutions
can now see the benefit of having schools,
because if they set up a school
and they set up a strong athletic program,
there's a good chance that they can get money.
Which is why you have so many prep schools, right?
No one can deny that there's prep schools out there
that are taking financial aid
and doing all types of things like that,
because it's the wild, wild west.
This whole game has been built around
not paying players.
Therefore the money goes to various adults
who are able to "provide" the players in some way.
Once you demonstrate you're somebody that has
access to players consistently, now you got money
from people who just want to stay in your good graces.
But then there's also money that comes in from sponsorships.
You might even be able to do endorsements around town.
Now, you're a pillar of the community
because you have built this football program
that does these things for these kids.
Bishop Sycamore does not happen
if there wasn't an abundance of money in high school sports.
If there wasn't this tie-in
between athletics and education.
And it was just sort of the naivety of the world
to think that there wouldn't be someone
as, um, exploitative as Roy,
who would come in and do that to the extremes.
What was in it for you?
Making the insecurity feel better.
There's a lot that goes into why I was doing it.
You know what I mean? So now if I'm saying it makes me feel better,
"Why does it make you feel better to help kids?"
Because I wanna help.
Well, why do you wanna help? 'Cause it makes me feel good.
Why do you wanna feel good? 'Cause I'm insecure.
- ♪ (SOFT MUSIC PLAYING) ♪
I don't know what the point of it was
'cause you're putting yourself out there
and you're a criminal now.
Like, what was... what was the point of it?
I really don't know.
Saying that there is one reason for Roy to do this
or one motivating factor is oversimplifying it.
Roy saw the kids as a means to an end.
What that end was is speculation.
It was perhaps profit. If this is a scam
and he's just trying to make some money,
either in the short term or in the long term.
Or it could have just been maybe notoriety and fame.
It was an opportunity for him to have an image of himself,
you know, locally in Columbus,
but also what he thought would be a nationwide thing.
And that is a powerful pull in this society,
is I want people to know who I am.
Whether it be fame or infamy, I want people to know who I am.
But I don't think there's value in infamy
when your infamy comes from exploiting kids.
♪ (TENSE MUSIC PLAYING) ♪
We get our ass kicked. They plaster me all over there.
Call me all types of names.
The New York Times writes a story about me
calling me crazy, calling me this,
I'm a con artist, all that. We still win. You know why?
Because that game got me on the phone
with Michael Strahan, and now I'm talking to you.
I love it when a plan comes together.
Now we got a platform to raise funds,
talk about what happened,
talk about what this program's about.
You wanna hear something crazy about all this?
More than 15 schools, after they canceled our season...
wanna play us next year.
You thought Bishop Sycamore was going anywhere?
You thought the stories that we made,
you thought the names that we called this
was gonna go somewhere?
You didn't think we're gonna climb that tree?
I can just see it now. Just the apologies.
You don't have to apologize to me.
Apologize to them.
The players, all those people that you said didn't exist.
You owe them an apology.
Do you know what my mother told me
before she died?
She said, "Baby, be still. Wait."
And so when this happened, I knew she gave me that message.
So I was still. And I took it.
But I'm not gonna be still anymore.
And I'm gonna tell you why.
After talking to you guys, I know the trajectory of my life
is gonna change drastically. I can feel it.
I can't see it, so I don't really understand
how it's gonna work, but I can feel it.
Better or worse? - Better.
I feel the energy.
I feel something that I haven't felt
in a long time.
Peace.
What DJ Khaled said?
"All we do is win, win, win no matter what."
♪ ("BACK ON OUR BS" BY J.D. PLAYS) ♪
♪ B-I-S-H-O-P I'm sick of y'all ♪
♪ We back on our bullshit ♪
♪ Got nothing left to lose ♪
♪ Yeah we out here Living ruthless ♪
♪ They gon have to prove it ♪
♪ Boy don't make me lose it ♪
♪ And there's nothing else Left to say ♪
♪ Ready to die by my mistakes ♪
♪ You gave up on me too quick ♪
♪ Now I'm back on my bullshit Yeah ♪
♪ Bro went to school And did his thing in the field ♪
♪ Other partner like Fuck the field ♪
♪ And I can't change How he feel ♪
♪ I heard I might get Booked for fraud ♪
♪ Tryna fight these appeals ♪
♪ Cuzzo a owl fly wit the flock He trying to chase us a mil ♪
♪ We all kings Where we come from ♪
♪ It don't matter How you get it, just win ♪
♪ We all ask the lord For forgiveness ♪
♪ Knowin' damn well We gon sin again ♪
♪ We don't promote The violence ♪
♪ But it ain't shit To send 'em in ♪
♪ My father sat down Served a homicide ♪
♪ Say he'll do it all again ♪
♪ Now I'm just lookin' For the answers ♪
♪ It seem like life Ain't been the same ♪
♪ Since we lost The bro to cancer ♪
♪ Reminisce on college ♪
♪ Go back to school And get my masters ♪
♪ They say slow money Ain't no money ♪
♪ So I learned To make it faster ♪
♪ We back on our bullshit ♪
♪ Got nothing left to lose
♪ Yeah we out here Living ruthless ♪
♪ They gon have to prove it ♪
♪ Boy don't make me lose it ♪
♪ And there's nothing else Left to say ♪
♪ Ready to die by my mistakes ♪
♪ You gave up on me too quick ♪
♪ Now I'm back on my bullshit Yeah ♪
- ♪ B ♪ - ♪ Boys to men switched up ♪
♪ Now we gotta Bring lawyers in ♪
- ♪ I ♪ - ♪ I had thought You was my partner ♪
♪ You 'pose to love ya friends ♪
- ♪ S ♪ - ♪ Scam likely Every time you call ♪
♪ Like when this shit gon end? ♪
- ♪ H ♪ - ♪ He knew we came from shit ♪
♪ But he rather go And stack dividends ♪
- ♪ O ♪ - ♪ Over and over I ask myself How could you let him in? ♪
- ♪ P ♪ - ♪ Plenty nights I question God ♪
♪ Feel like fuck it we win ♪
♪ Fuck it we win ♪
♪ B-I-S-H-O-P I'm sick of y'all ♪
♪ We back on our bullshit ♪
♪ Got nothing left to lose
♪ Yeah we out here Living ruthless ♪
♪ They gon have to prove it ♪
♪ Boy don't make me lose it ♪
♪ And there's nothing else Left to say ♪
♪ Ready to die by my mistakes ♪
♪ (MUSIC CONCLUDES) ♪