Friday Night Lies: The Bishop Sycamore Story

by Andrew King

As featured in the HBO documentary B.S. High The riveting true story of a sham school run by longtime con men whose scheme crashed and burned live on television In August of 2021, a high school football team became the talk of the nation. A featured matchup on ESPN pitted national powerhouse IMG Academy against a school called Bishop Sycamore—a program with an unfamiliar name, a barely functional website, and a long list of baggage. The supposedly elite Bishop Sycamore lost 56-0, embarrassing broadcasters and setting social media alight. Within days, the program fired its coach, deleted its website, and prompted a string of official investigations. The story of the school, however, began three years earlier when an unknown program called COF Academy launched in Columbus, Ohio. Journalist Andrew King and whistleblower Ben Ferree pushed for years to expose this exploitation of high school football and education systems which left vulnerable students in the crossfire and culminated in a series of lawsuits and criminal charges.Readers will learn how a pair of old friends hatched a disastrous plan in this rigorously reported tale of ambition, greed and the allure of sports.

Genres: Sports, Nonfiction, Crime

314 pages, Kindle Edition

Published September 1, 2023

Reviews

[Jillian B · Rating 4 out of 5]

Was Bishop Sycamore High School actually a school…or a scam? That’s what viewers were asking themselves as they watched the so-called sports academy’s football team get absolutely demolished in a game that aired on ESPN. Friday Night Lies explores everything that led up to the infamous game, as well as the fallout.

What I liked about this book:
-It was well-researched, with strong interviews. An especially standout character was former head coach Leroy Johnson, who gave some bombastic quotes.
-The story itself is so compelling. It was so interesting to see all of the details laid out in a long-form format.
-I liked that it used interviews with experts to explore themes like the pressure on young athletes and the sometimes deceptive nature of college scholarship offers.

What didn’t work for me:
-The timeline was sometimes confusing. As someone who had forgotten a lot of the details of the Bishop Sycamore scandal, it would have been helpful to have the relationship between COF and Bishop Sycamore briefly explained earlier in the book, because I didn’t understand all of the references in the beginning.

Overall, I would recommend this book. Even as someone who’s not much of a sports fan, I couldn’t stop turning the pages!

[Gage Volbert · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was excited for this book even prior to the release of the HBO Documentary, Friday Night Lies, and this book far surpassed my expectations! The story takes it’s time to explore all the systemic failings that had to take place for there to even create a Bishop Sycamore in the first place. The reporting of King and Ferree point out many of the loopholes in place that were exploited by Roy Johnson which allowed him to repeatedly take advantage of the people around him and the continue to walk away without facing consequences.

This book does a great job not just of sharing the story of how Johnson created Christians of Faith Academy and Bishop Sycamore but also exploring the pitfalls of pressure that student athletes feel when getting “offers” from collegiate athletic programs, the American mindset which connects athletics to education, and the grey areas which allow entities like Bishop Sycamore to exist.

I highly recommend this book!

[SheMac · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really 3.5* ... I was excited to find this book because I had just seen HBO's BS HIGH. I didn't even read much of it before purchasing because I was so interested in the subject. But the book was somewhat disappointing. In the beginning the authors discuss (probably because they didn't completely understand) the various business relationships that Roy Johnson developed before creating Christians of Faith Academy in a sort of confusing manner. King and Ferree then begin to tell the stories of COF and Bishop Sycamore simultaneously without explaining that B.S. was really the successor to COF, something, I think, anyone who had not seen the movie would find confusing. Finally, I wish the authors had spent more time talking about the students, who were truly the victims here. Still, the story is remarkable enough to make this book worth the read.

[Ryo · Rating 3 out of 5]

I received a copy of this book for free in a Goodreads giveaway.

I haven't seen the documentary about Bishop Sycamore, nor had I even heard of the whole scandal until I read this book. Given my total lack of knowledge about the scandal, I felt like the book did a decent job detailing the people and their actions that caused a lot of people so much harm. I do wish the book were better organized and some of the people more fleshed out, however. I appreciated that the book covered not only the scandal itself and the people involved in it, but also some of the systems at work that enabled a lot of the problems, like non-binding offers made to students and the pressure they face in high school when trying to make it into the big leagues, or the limited ability of any governmental institution to crack down on fake schools like Bishop Sycamore to stop them from exploiting the system and misleading students. The book is not organized strictly chronologically, which isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it occasionally caused me confusion. For example, the book makes frequent mention of Bishop Sycamore, after setting up what COF Academy was and how it came to be. It's only several chapters later, after the book starts mentioning Bishop Sycamore, that the book finally explains that the latter was a successor to the former, and how that happened. They also suddenly mention that someone named Young died, but I wasn't able to find previous mentions of him, at least not through some cursory skimming of the preceding few pages (and the book has no index, which would have helped). Later on, they explain that Young was the bishop of the church that was supposed to fund COF Academy, but the explanation felt like it was too late. I did appreciate that there's some balance in how Roy Johnson, the mastermind behind the whole thing, is portrayed, in that the book is explicit about how he frequently lied and cheated other people, and yet they also include a few quotes of people praising him, saying that he genuinely did want to help people, even if he tried to do it through dishonest means, and he also didn't really profit off of the scandal, so it's hard to see him as purely a villain. I do wish the book followed some of the students' lives more closely, as they seemed kind of underdeveloped. It would have been interesting to follow a small number of them and see their lives at school in greater detail, rather than periodic mentions of dozens of students and their ultimate fates. The book does end rather abruptly, and part of that may be that the whole affair seems a bit unresolved, without any real answers or even suggestions about how to stop this sort of thing from happening again. I was entertained, though, reading about how a con artist managed to con so many people and even end up on national television, only for his house of cards to come crashing down soon after.

[Robert · Rating 3 out of 5]

"So I'd say school, selling false dreams, and funding. I think that's the concept of lying, selling false dreams."

This is the true story about a high school that was not a high school that fielded a football team made up of players who were too old to play high school football but yet wanted to go back and play one final year of high school football. This is the confusing and sad story of Bishop Sycamore (high school?) football team. Told in a scattershot manor, the story is hard to follow as there are many characters involved in the scam and many other factors that contributed to the creation of the team, including a sketchy affiliation with the African Methodist Episcopal Church.

I remarked that this is a confusing tale as the authors do not present the material in a way that follows a traditional timeline. That is not a bad thing but it does not work here as there are so many moving players and parts to tell the entire tale. A narrative review by a historian would have been a good choice to formulate a proper timeline and keep things in focus. In addition, there are no footnotes or a works cited section. This makes it difficult to further understand all the details of the story by hiding the primary and secondary references. For example, it is not clear if the authors conducted a first person interview with the main protagonist, Leroy Johnson, or whether his quotes came from outside sources such as the HBO documentary. Overall, Friday Night Lies: The Bishop Sycamore Story is an important book that documents the incredible sports drama that took the country by storm for several weeks back in 2021.

[John Schorg · Rating 3 out of 5]

The circumstances behind the Bishop Sycamore scandal demand this type of accounting, but it also must be said that it is very difficult to follow most of the maneuvering that is documented here. Perhaps the most disturbing aspect is there doesn't seem to be anything anyone in power is willing to do to keep this from happening again.

[Chuck Segall]

Overall, I thought this book was well-written and researched. There are some minor things throughout that raises a touch of doubt to the findings. There are minor problems with descriptions of legal process that would have easily been discovered with minor research on that issue. But overall this was an interesting read. COF/Bishop Sycamore was a scam from the start.

[Thompson Seiwell · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting story. But neither it nor the documentary answer my question - how were they getting money to actually operate for full seasons?