Roy Johnson’s pitch sounded amazing.
“It was supposed to be IMG, basically, of the Midwest,” Saadiq Mickens says.
It was the summer of 2018, and Mickens had contacted Roy Johnson about joining the Christians of Faith Academy Ironmen. These contacts usually worked the other way around — with Johnson reaching out on social media to prospective players — but Mickens had a friend on the Columbus, Ohio-based team. Mickens, who was entering his junior year of high school, had spent his first two years at Westerville (Ohio) North High. He hadn’t played on the football team for a variety of reasons.
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“They don’t like me,” he says of the administration at the public high school in suburban Columbus, “I don’t like them.” But Johnson asked Mickens for his height and weight. After correspondence first by social media and then by phone, Johnson granted Mickens a spot on the team as a tight end. Mickens says Johnson told players they’d end up the stars of a Netflix series similar to “Last Chance U.” Mickens remembers a camera crew briefly followed the team in 2018, filming practices and recording interviews with players.
After COF Academy fizzled in its first year, Johnson tried to build that Midwest version of IMG Academy again using the same playbook. This time he and partner Andre Peterson called their school Bishop Sycamore High. And Bishop Sycamore just might land Johnson on a streaming service. After all, Fyre Festival got dueling documentaries on Netflix and Hulu.
Like the infamous failed music festival that left ticket-buyers stranded in the Bahamas with nowhere to stay and only cheese sandwiches to eat, COF Academy and Bishop Sycamore were touted as something with great potential. And just like Fyre Festival, both of Johnson’s attempts at creating his version of a high school superteam ended in a fury of unpaid bills, lawsuits and investigations.
Wednesday, the fallout from Bishop Sycamore’s 58-0 loss to the real IMG Academy — broadcast to an amused and/or horrified audience on ESPN — continued as the manager of a Fairfield Inn in Canton, Ohio, called local police to report that Bishop Sycamore’s team paid for a block of 25 rooms with two bad checks written for a total of $3,596, first reported by the Canton Repository. This isn’t the first time one of Johnson’s teams has been accused of skipping out on a hotel bill, and it isn’t anywhere near the largest amount.
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That was the $110,685.40 Johnson owed after his COF Academy team spent three months living in a Baymont Inn in Delaware, Ohio, in 2018.
Eight months after the team departed, the hotel’s management company sued Johnson for the amount. That case was dismissed without prejudice — meaning it can be re-filed — in November 2019 after multiple failures to serve Johnson. Meanwhile, Johnson and former Ohio State player Jay Richardson — who is also a local television personality at ABC6 in Columbus — are defendants in a 2018 civil suit filed by Great Merchants bank alleging Johnson, Richardson and others obtained a $100,000 loan by misrepresenting themselves as officers of the African Methodist Episcopal Church. The loan hasn’t been repaid, and on Friday the court issued a summary judgement in favor of the bank. A hearing has been set for Nov. 18 to determine damages.
Richardson and Johnson were also named in a 2018 suit filed in Franklin County, Ohio, by Heartland Bank attempting to recover damages from a defaulted $92,020 loan that was used to purchase a 2017 Range Rover.
Richardson has claimed to have “zero involvement” with Bishop Sycamore, but his name is on court documents in conjunction with Johnson’s endeavors. Richardson’s last name is also on the original Bishop Sycamore logo. Andre Peterson, who conducted an interview with The Athletic on Monday along with Johnson, claims to be Bishop Sycamore’s director. Peterson also told USA Today on Tuesday that he fired Johnson as coach on Sunday, though neither man made mention of the “firing” while speaking to The Athletic on Monday.

Johnson, 41, has an outstanding warrant in Delaware County for failure to pay a fine resulting from his guilty plea in a case that began in March 2020, when his ex-girlfriend called the Delaware County Sheriff’s Office and accused Johnson of assaulting her and busting her lip open during a struggle for the woman’s car keys. Johnson told police he didn’t touch the woman. Responding officers noted in their report that the woman had a split lip, and the woman provided a written statement describing the altercation. Johnson was arrested and spent more than two days in jail before bonding out. Johnson eventually pleaded guilty to criminal mischief and received a 60-day suspended sentence and one year of probation. Johnson was ordered to pay a $250 fine and court costs by Nov. 10, 2020. No payment was received. In July, a bench warrant was issued commanding Johnson be arrested if he is found.
Watching the stories about Bishop Sycamore explode all over the Internet on Sunday evening was cathartic for Ben Ferree. It was also incredibly frustrating for the former investigator for the Ohio High School Athletic Association.
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“I have been trying to bring these people to some sort of justice for years,” Ferree said. “To see it all starting to come crashing down is equal parts happy and upsetting. When I was an OHSAA employee begging schools to not schedule these games or asking media to run stories on this, nothing. Then it goes viral on Twitter, now we can jump on them? Cool.”
After investigating COF Academy and Bishop Sycamore, Ferree has his own theory about how Johnson profits — and it tracks with the lawsuits and complaints that have been filed against Johnson.
“The scam was passing themselves off as a premier program in order to schedule big games,” Ferree said. “Here’s how they make money. They will contact the school that has problems filling a schedule that is a powerhouse program. Your St. Ed’s, your DeMathas, your IMGs. They’ll say, ‘We’ll play you and we’re going to be good, maybe not this year, but we’re going to be good, so it is worthwhile for you to play us.’ Then they say, ‘But because we’re so new, we need you to pay our travel expenses.’ The large powerhouse program says fine and cuts them a check.
“They then just pocket that money. They don’t pay the bus companies. They don’t pay anybody. And there is a trail of lawsuits. Roy Johnson, Andre Peterson and Jay Richardson and their subsidiary companies are currently on the hook for over a half million dollars as a result of the COF Academy, Bishop Sycamore cases, from evictions from apartment complexes, from hotels, bussing companies, banks. They’ve defaulted on loans. You name it, they’ve done it.”
Mickens, who also played for COF Academy, said the stories about living in an apartment that contained only air mattresses were true. That was the arrangement immediately after the team left the Baymont Inn. But Mickens disputed a former teammate’s assertion that players for COF Academy had to resort to stealing from stores to eat.
“That’s a lie,” Mickens says. “Roy was definitely buying food every day.”
Mickens says he grew tired of eating the same salad day after day while at the Baymont Inn, but after the team relocated to the apartments, a “team mom” would cook meals and then send a text to the team to tell them to come eat.
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“Most of the players that were doing the interviews, they were homeless,” Mickens says. “Roy gave them homes and gave them clothes and food.”
Mickens says COF Academy players could meet at a library if they chose to do online classwork. He says that in 2019, Bishop Sycamore partnered with YouthBuild Columbus Community School, a dropout prevention academy that employs teachers and has a building. (The address of which still comes up when searching on Google for Bishop Sycamore’s physical address.)
But like nearly everything else involving Bishop Sycamore, that partnership fizzled. Currently, the home page for the YBCCS web site contains a disclaimer at the top: “YBCCS is in no way affiliated with Bishop Sycamore.”
Even when there was a brick-and-mortar school building, the existence was a far cry from the dream Johnson sold those original COF Academy players. He said the program would build a dorm and other facilities. The idea was to create something similar to IMG Academy. “No different than Apollo giving Rocky the shot,” Johnson said of IMG Academy scheduling his team. Except the game played out more like the Apollo Creed-Ivan Drago fight.
The outcome is easy to understand once one considers the difference between the school Johnson sought to emulate and the one he actually created.
IMG Academy began its life in 1978 as tennis coach Nick Bollettieri’s training school and added multiple sports through the years, including golf, baseball, soccer, basketball and eventually football. The school charges tuition in the high five figures, and room and board can push the cost above $100,000 a year. The school, underwritten by global talent agency William Morris Endeavor, gives scholarships to the most talented players on its football teams. The entire roster of IMG Academy’s top team is being recruited to play at FBS schools.
It has classrooms, full-time teachers, counselors and administrators as well as strength coaches and medical staffers to treat injuries. The school has a world-class strength facility. Just three years ago, Matt Rhea ran that program for the football team. Rhea now helps run the strength program for Alabama’s football team. IMG’s current strength coach, Jeff Dillman, has been the head strength coach at Florida and South Carolina.
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If Johnson and his cohorts wanted to recreate all of that in Ohio, they underestimated the infrastructure costs by a few million dollars.
Perhaps their idea sprang from watching the world of elite basketball recruiting, where an elite traveling high school team — and the accompanying high school — can be created relatively cheaply. Just last week, star class of 2021 basketball recruit Emoni Bates committed to play college basketball at Memphis. Bates played for Ypsi Prep, a school designed by the father of Bates to showcase the talents of his son. The only other students were Bates’ teammates, and they took classes online and played basketball.
Creating a high school around an elite traveling basketball team requires five or more players — at least one of whom needs to be a star — some web-based classes and a basketball court. Creating a similar concept in football requires at minimum dozens of players — many of whom need to be excellent to compete against an elite national schedule such as Bishop Sycamore’s — classes for all of those players, equipment that can run more than $500 per player and a football field-sized space.
Without these things, all Bishop Sycamore could offer was the chance to play some of the best teams in the nation. That didn’t lure top recruits, most of whom can find multiple well-funded programs near their homes that would be happy to have them on their teams. Instead, Bishop Sycamore lured players seeking a last chance.
This resulted in a collection of post-grad players who didn’t qualify for college or high schoolers who had exhausted other options. At least one player on Bishop Sycamore’s roster has appeared on a junior college roster. Mecose Todd, a former three-star prospect out of Carrollton, Ga., in the 2020 class, was once on Iowa Western’s roster. But he has represented himself on social media as a class of 2022 player at Bishop Sycamore.

The most recognizable player on Bishop Sycamore’s roster is Trilian Harris, and not only because his red facemask is a different color from his teammates’. He’s the lanky, 6-foot-6 starting quarterback from Mission Viejo, Calif., who appeared in two games in three days for Bishop Sycamore last week, one of which was the televised IMG matchup.
Despite all that has happened since Sunday — including his program’s schedule falling apart and his coach’s legitimacy publicly questioned — Harris was chipper on Wednesday morning. He was eager to tell the world that his team was just getting a bad rap because people don’t understand it.
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“We don’t have any college dropouts or 30-year-olds or 20-year-olds,” Harris says. “We didn’t lie to get on ESPN or lie to compete against IMG. What you’re reading in the blogs, none of that is true. Our coaches just want the best opportunity for us. We got 10 or 12 guys from California, Florida and Texas and they are big on competing. We’ll go play Mater Dei, we’ll go play IMG, we’ll go play Bishop Gorman. We’ll play all of those schools. We had the hardest schedule in the country, but it blew up because we played on ESPN.”
Harris was originally a quarterback prospect in the 2021 class and he had reported interest from Oregon, USC and Washington State early in his career. There are recruiting updates from when he was an underclassman about taking recruiting visits, even in the Los Angeles Times. He was once a legitimate prospect. But he said he didn’t graduate high school and needs an opportunity to get everything in line — both game tape and academics — before he can achieve his dream of playing college football.
Harris reports an offer from Louisiana-Monroe, but a source close to the situation indicated that while Harris was on the school’s board early, he doesn’t have an offer now. Harris also said he’s regularly in contact with MAC programs like Akron, Eastern Michigan and Toledo. He claims that Bishop Sycamore is a school and he’s taking classes digitally with the 50 or so other players on the team.
“All (the college coaches) are waiting for is film,” Harris said. “That’s why we’re playing the national schedule. Even though we get our butts whooped, we play our hearts out. It’s not about winning or losing. It’s about getting the film.”
What’s a regular day at Bishop Sycamore? According to Harris, they have workouts from 5-7:30 a.m., then 30 minutes off to eat before practice from 8-9 a.m. After that, the team returns to their apartments — which Harris said are located in the Polaris area in suburban Columbus — to shower. Then the team goes to a facility for recovery before everyone takes classes on computers or phones at Excel Academy, an accredited online high school. He said there are eight or 10 coaches around, the team is well fed and that Johnson got him a roof over his head, a 55-inch television and an air mattress.
As for the film, Harris will have to stand on the team’s first three games for a while. Games against Bishop Sycamore are dropping quickly. Johnson County Central in Kentucky, Friday’s scheduled opponent, canceled on Tuesday. So did Duncanville (Texas) High and DeMatha Catholic in Hyattsville, Md.
“Because they have ineligible players, it really was a liability risk with some of the age of some of the players to play with young men in high school,” said Father James Day, President of DeMatha. “So we withdrew from the game.”
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Some players who appear on rosters provided by Bishop Sycamore are grateful now they never actually made it to the school. Brothers Matthew and Mark Armah appear on the roster handed to announcers for Bishop Sycamore’s Aug. 19 season opener against Archbishop Hoban. The Armahs are from Edmonton, Alberta, and neither set foot in Ohio. Matthew Armah says they corresponded with Johnson for months but ultimately decided not to join the team because Johnson kept failing to answer their most important question.
“Every time we asked him how we’d live, we’d never get a clear answer,” Matthew Armah says. “We need to know the living situation. We’re not just going down there if we don’t know.”
Linebacker Kofi Taylor-Barrocks also appeared on that roster. A 6-foot-3, 220-pound linebacker from London (and not the London in suburban Columbus), he was supposed to leave the United Kingdom to join Bishop Sycamore this month, but he told The Athletic in a direct message that he canceled his plans when questions arose about the program following Sunday’s game.
Johnson had touted the arrival of Taylor-Barrocks on a podcast in August. Going international would be another way to bolster Bishop Sycamore’s roster — and to avoid more questions as word spread locally about the issues surrounding Johnson’s team. But Taylor-Barrocks remains on the other side of the Atlantic, grateful he didn’t get on a plane and wind up in a foreign country on a crumbling team.
So where is Johnson? A phone number that worked Monday was disconnected Wednesday. He’s wanted in Delaware County, Ohio. He’s got a complaint sworn out against him in Stark County, Ohio. The elite schedule that was the only part of his dream that actually came together according to plan has fallen apart.
But on Wednesday, Bishop Sycamore’s Twitter account sent a link to a new endeavor — a school store selling Bishop Sycamore-branded merchandise.
“It gives you exposure,” Johnson told The Athletic the day after the IMG Academy game. “It gives you a chance to be seen. It gives people a chance to hear our story.”
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For better or for worse, everyone has heard.
— The Athletic‘s Kate Hairopoulos contributed reporting.
(Screenshot of Roy Johnson from the ESPN-televised game between Bishop Sycamore and IMG Academy)
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