Earlier this fall, the football world found itself briefly focused on a small charter school in Ohio after Bishop Sycamore got blown out on national television by IMG Academy, to the point that the announcers calling the game couldn’t hold back their disgust that the game ever got scheduled, much less put on television.
In the aftermath, further details emerged about the lack of funding for the program and how players at the previous iteration of the school slept on floors and stole from grocery stores just to eat. Ultimately, the coach of the team was fired and the story eventually faded into the background, but that will change in 2022 when not one but two documentaries on the Bishop Sycamore debacle will be released. Kevin Hart and Rich Paul are partnering on one such documentary, which was announced back in September, and that will now be joined by an HBO Sports documentary on the program from Michael Strahan and Adam McKay.
HBO Sports has acquired the television and streaming rights to a feature documentary chronicling the Bishop Sycamore high school football scandal from Michael Strahan and Constance Schwartz-Morini’s SMAC Entertainment, Adam McKay’s Hyperobject Industries, Boat Rocker’s Matador Content, and The Athletic. The film will debut on HBO and be available to stream on HBO Max in 2022.
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With exclusive access to [coach Roy] Johnson, the documentary will explore two very beguiling questions: What exactly is Bishop Sycamore and who in the world is Roy Johnson?
Both documentaries promise unique interviews with people involved, with the Hart/Paul doc promising interviews with players and coaches, while it seems the HBO doc will have the much talked about coach as the centerpiece of its look at the saga. We’ll find out next year just how interested folks still are in all of this, but for those still wondering how this program even came to exist, we should get answers aplenty from a variety of viewpoints.