Ray Holtzclaw was glued to ESPN’s broadcast of IMG Academy and Bishop Sycamore long before the internet started to buzz about the game on Sunday night.
Holtzclaw counted the players on the Bishop Sycamore sideline, trying to identify recognizable faces. He wondered how Bishop Sycamore has been able to field a competitive team from a distance against IMG Academy, a super team based in Bradenton, Fla. That is teeming with the top prospects every year sought by the top college programs in the country.
Why did Holtzclaw care so much? His son, a talented quarterback prospect named Judah, was almost on that pitch in Canton, Ohio. And IMG’s defensive linemen, who hold scholarship offers from Alabama, Clemson, Ohio State, and the rest of college football’s elite programs, would likely have played on Judah as they did so with Bishop Sycamore’s quarterbacks in a 58-0 win over IMG.
“It’s really sad,” Holtzclaw told The Athletic on Monday. “They have good kids on their team who just want to play football, want to take it to the next level, whatever. But the guys who run it lie and cheat. It’s terrible. “
So who are these guys? And how did a match between the nation’s best collection of high school football talent and a pop-up online school – which had also played a match less than 48 hours earlier – end on ESPN? It took a lot of characters:
There was the coach who has now created two schools from scratch and continues to leave a trail of unpaid bills.
There was the conglomerate-led super-team that canceled that coach in 2018 because officials feared his squad was not legitimate – but then faced him in 2020.
There was the guy who orchestrates the games on the side whose day job is vice president of sales at Billboard, the publication with the biggest hits in music.