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Is Bishop Sycamore a real school? It was time for its new head football coach to set the record straight.
Over the past couple weeks, everybody’s heard the story of Bishop Sycamore, the team that somehow found its way onto ESPN for a matchup against IMG Academy. It turned out Bishop Sycamore wasn’t a traditional high school and that it wasn’t anywhere up to the task of playing a competitive game.
So what exactly is Bishop Sycamore? Head coach Tyren Jackson discussed it with Jamie Ostroff of NBC4 Columbus over the weekend, referring to it as a “post-grad football academy.”
“We do not offer curriculum,” Jackson told Ostroff. “We are not a school. That’s not what Bishop Sycamore is, and I think that’s what the biggest misconception about us was, and that was our fault. Because that was a mistake on paperwork.”
However, there were still some puzzling parts of this story not clarified with those comments. For example, Bishop Sycamore had reported a bell schedule on the paperwork it submitted to the Ohio Department of Education, which seems to be something it wouldn’t need.
Jackson, who replaced recently fired head coach Roy Johnson, wasn’t sure why that happened.
“Right, and I don’t know anything about that. I won’t speak on stuff I don’t know about,” Jackson told Ostroff. “Like I said, if it was something that happened like that, then that’s terrible. That’s not how you do business.”
It’s all been quite the saga, which is why there’s even a Bishop Sycamore documentary already in the works.
Jake Rill contributes to news coverage for Saturday Down South. He has covered the SEC since 2016.
