High school football's dirty secret predates Bishop Sycamore
This weekend, the college football season kicks off in full force; here in Athens, Georgia, I know people who have already put up their tailgate tents, and we’re still a week away from the home opener. (They’ve gotten rained on a lot.) College football has experienced a substantial amount of turmoil in recent months — and it is at last becoming increasingly obvious that this is and probably has always been semipro football, not “college” football. The games are being played on college campuses, and these kids are, in fact, going to college classes, at least occasionally. The veil is gone. People still love it, but we know now what it is.
But when you turn on your television and see “high school football” on ESPN and its family of networks, what you are seeing bears little to no resemblance to what we have always thought of as high school football, or even what we saw on “Friday Night Lights.” And we may have the bizarre story of Bishop Sycamore to thank for that.
In a scandal so ridiculous it at first seems like a terrible joke, a group of hucksters calling themselves a high school football team from Bishop Sycamore essentially tricked ESPN (and Paragon Sports, which books high school games for ESPN) into letting them play on its flagship station last week against IMG Academy, a football factory in Florida that will provide some of the top freshmen throughout college football next season. The scandal is truly too remarkable to sum up in a paragraph here — I’d recommend this thorough Awful Announcing piece — but somehow Bishop Sycamore put together a team of older teens and grown men, called it a “high school” team and got on national television. Why were they able to do this? That’s the true scandal: The team they were playing isn’t an ordinary high school either.
That’s the thing about the “high school football” you watch on national television: It’s only there as a way to showcase the individual players hoping to play college and professional ball. It’s not like there are legions of “IMG Academy” fans beyond parents and friends of the players. Bishop Sycamore didn’t seem to have a fixed campus environment or a rigorous academic syllabus (and its classes were all based online). But IMG Academy more closely resembles an assembly line for collegiate programs than a mainstream high school. Privately owned and operated by the William Morris Endeavor agency, IMG is explicitly designed to funnel talent to college programs and, eventually, professional ones. (And it costs many tens of thousands of dollars a year for students not on scholarship.)
https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/high-school-football-s-dirty-secret-predates-bishop-sycamore-ncna1278497
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There's a "little IMG" in my former home town in TN, called Lakeway Christian. They have classes, but they're a glorified sports academy and they poach from the public schools.
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