IGX

In 2021, on a nationally televised high school football game on ESPN, IMG Academy took on Bishop Sycamore and blew them out 58-0. The ensuing investigation found that Bishop Sycamore was essentially a fake high school in Columbus, OH, where the 'students' lived in hotel rooms, didn't go to school, many of the players were ineligible to play because of age, and the coach got his plays off of Madden. BS High is a Max documentary about the scandal. While I was looking forward to it, it turned out to be one of the strangest and most disappointing documentaries I have ever seen.

While they interviewed the former players in a well-lit spacious room all dressed in tasteful streetwear, the former coach was interviewed in a room that looked like an interrogation room in a police station where the camera conveniently doesn't work. All the white guys interviewed dressed like they were about to go on Springer and find out a secret from their girlfriends. While the documentary tried to present the athletes as innocent victims who thought they were going to an elite football prep school (and many of them probably were), it omitted the fact that many of the athletes were too old to play high school sports and that the school couldn't fly to games because too many of the players had active warrants. It insinuates that the elite schools Bishop Sycamore paid them to come in and get beaten (like pretty much every major college program does with the bulk of its non-conference games) and that the coach pocketed the money, rather than determining if he was using it to fund expenses because the school has no other source of revenue. Finally, it insinuates that the top high school football programs are like Bishop Sycamore but presents no evidence to support this argument.

What's most interesting to me, and also left out, is that the Bishop Sycamore experiment was starting to work before the scandal made the players untouchable. One player received a scholarship offer from Syracuse, and another from Kentucky and Yale. A better story would probably have been that a charismatic coach cut ethical corners with panache, was trying to hold things together any way he could despite taking enormous amounts of personal debt and being in entirely over his head, may have actually had decent intentions, and damn near pulled it off.

Reminds me of Last Chance U. That was depressing. We see that in a lot of these docs --when people are on a certain level, others in their environment are on that level, and sometimes not even.