On Sunday, ESPN cried foul and said it had been scammed into airing the football games of a little-known Ohio charter school, and now the fallout begins as the school fired its coach today.
ESPN was miffed during the airing of Sunday’s Sycamore Bishop football game. The network had agreed to air the school’s games thinking its football program was up-and-coming. It turns out it was anything but, and even as they aired the game, ESPN’s on-air commentators began insisting they had been duped.
Naturally, the team was crushed in the game with a final score of 58-0. But this poor showing has been the standard for the Bishop Sycamore team. In fact, the team has only won five games in its entire existence. The situation is such an embarrassment for everyone that Ohio Governor Mike DeWine has called for the state’s Department of Education to investigate the whole thing.
Now the charter school is taking action by firing its coach, Roy Johnson. In addition, the school’s director, Andre Peterson, is looking to file fraud charges against the coach and wants an investigation into the team’s injury tracking procedures as “part of a lot of things” that formed some of the reasons Johnson was released.
“I value him as a person, but I just thought right now he needed to step down, he needed to go,” Peterson told USA Today. “We just decided to mutually part ways.”
Outkick also noted that Johnson has a passel full of legal troubles:
Bishop Sycamore football coach Leroy (Roy) Johnson… faces an active warrant out of Delaware, Ohio, and multiple civil lawsuits, according to court documents obtained by OutKick.
The bench warrant for failure to appear in a domestic violence case, which was eventually dropped to a criminal mischief charge, was issued July 2 by the Delaware County Sheriff’s Office and remains active.
Then Friday, a Franklin County judge ruled Johnson and Jay Richardson, a former Ohio State Buckeye and current Columbus prep sports TV personality, will go to trial for defaulting on a $100,000 loan issued in April 2018 that was never repaid to First Merchants Bank.
During Sunday’s broadcast, ESPN’s Anish Shroff admitted that the network was never able to verify the claims that Johnson made in his bid to convince ESPN to air the games.
“Bishop Sycamore told us they had a number of Division I prospects on their roster, and to be frank, a lot of that, we could not verify,” Shroff said. “They did not show up in our database, they did not show up in the databases of other recruiting services. So, OK, that’s what you’re telling us, fine, that’s how we take it in. From what we’ve seen so far, this is not a fair fight, and there’s got to be a point where you’re worried about health and safety.”
Yet ESPN aired the game anyway.
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