Michael Strahan’s Bishop Sycamore Football Project Caught Up in Coach’s Fraud Case

Rick Porter
·3 min read
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HBO has begun production on a documentary about the Bishop Sycamore football scandal. Meanwhile, one of the film’s producers is being told to stop payment to a key participant who’s involved in a fraud case.

A refresher: A year ago, ESPN broadcast a game between powerhouse IMG Academy — a Florida prep school for top-level high school athletes — and Bishop Sycamore of Columbus, Ohio, which claimed to have a number of sought after recruits on its own roster. IMG won the game 58-0, and during the broadcast ESPN’s crew expressed concern for the safety of the Sycamore players. “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,” play-by-play announcer Anish Shroff said during the game.

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After the game, reporting from a number of outlets uncovered that Bishop Sycamore was a school in name only and had no fixed address or class schedule and wasn’t recognized by the body that oversees high school sports in Ohio. Coach Roy Johnson was fired after the game, and his replacement subsequently told a Columbus TV station, “We’re not a school,” referring to Bishop Sycamore as a “post-grad football academy.”

SMAC Entertainment, the company headed by Michael Strahan and Constance Schwartz-Morini, secured exclusive rights and access to Johnson’s story for scripted TV and film projects in September 2021 — though it says now that it didn’t pay Johnson for participating in the documentary. SMAC partnered with Boat Rocker’s Matador Content on the documentary and planned to develop a scripted project via its SMAC Productions arm. The doc landed at HBO a month later, with Adam McKay’s Hyperobject Industries and The Athletic joining SMAC and Boat Rocker in producing.

The documentary, now called BS High, is in production, HBO announced Monday. Travon Free and Martion Desmond Roe of the Oscar-winning short film Two Distant Strangers are directing, and the outlet released a short behind-the-scenes clip of Johnson preparing to sit for an interview (watch it below).

As if the Bishop Sycamore saga isn’t twisty enough, Johnson was also a defendant in a fraud case. Indiana-based First Merchants Bank alleged in court papers that Johnson, a company he founded called The Richard Allen Group, and James E. Richardson IV, a Columbus sportscaster and former NFL player, defrauded the bank out of a $100,000 loan by falsely claiming to be authorized representatives of the African Methodist Episcopal Church in Columbus. The church’s governing body in central Ohio, however, said it never gave permission for Johnson’s company to serve as its financial arm.

A Franklin County, Ohio, magistrate ruled in March that the three defendants owed the bank $120,602.09 in damages and interest. In late June, as reported by sports media site Awful Announcing — which has followed the Bishop Sycamore story closely in the past year — First Merchants Bank filed a motion seeking to stop SMAC Entertainment from paying Johnson anything until Johnson settled his debt in the fraud case. Last week, a Franklin County judge granted First Merchants a creditor’s bill that will stop “Johnson, his agents and his attorneys” from receiving any payment from SMAC until the bank has its money.

“In November, we entered into an agreement to option and acquire the exclusive rights to Roy Johnson’s life story in connection with a potential scripted project,” a SMAC spokesperson told The Hollywood Reporter. “He was not paid for participating in the documentary.”

BS High is executive produced by McKay and Todd Schulman for Hyperobject Industries; Strahan and Schwartz-Morini for SMAC Entertainment; Jay Peterson, Todd Lubin and Jack Turner for Matador Content; Alex Mather and Ankur Chawla for The Athletic; and Spencer Paysinger for Moore Street Productions.

The teaser for BS High is below.

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