Somehow ESPN aired a football game between a real and very good football team and a faked up team from a fake high school.
There are allegations of child endangerment, fraud, and all sort of awfulness in the background. Naturally, social media is upset.
First, commentators were confused and worried about player safety during a broadcast where the teams were comically or dangerously mismatched.
The broadcast team for ESPN was in shock. They struggled to fill airtime while the blowout took place and mentioned they were unable to verify Bishop Sycamore's story. That led to the commentators ultimately bringing up the concern they had for the safety of the players involved.
This caused a huge stir on social media, but it was nothing compared to what took place after. More details about the program emerged on Monday and things have snowballed from there.
Then it was discovered the badly out-gunned team had played a game 24 hours prior. Shortly thereafter it was uncovered that the High School team roster was suspiciously full of post-graduate students. It did not take long to find out the fake team was potentially sourced from a fake school.
This is where things take an even more bizarre turn. Many have noticed that Bishop Sycamore plays a lot of postgraduate players. In fact, some have played in junior college games, and as a result are older than most high school athletes.
The story about whether or not the Bishop Sycamore program was actually affiliated with a school really picked up steam after personal experiences with the team began popping up on Yappi, an online community forum for high school sports in Ohio. One particular thread featured a slew of concerned parents, former players and amateur sleuths posting a series of alarming accusations about Bishop Sycamore. One of which notes that the head coach of the football team, Roy Johnson, has been in serious legal trouble for quite some time including pending civil suits and rumors of an active arrest warrant. These claims haven't been verified, but that hasn't stopped Awful Announcing and other media outlets from chasing down the story from a parent who had children in the program.
ESPN is quite sorry.
ESPN has since released a statement about the game.
"We regret that this happened and have discussed it with Paragon, which secured the matchup and handles the majority of our high school event scheduling. They have ensured us that they will take steps to prevent this kind of situation from happening moving forward."
