you mean raising the bridge or lowering the road or…
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That is a wonderful tale.
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Too bad @kthejoker spilled the beans. 
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IMG also pays for these kinds of matchups as they are trying to build value in their students for future college and pro picks. So, there’s a lot of money trading hands here. Add into it the ad money when these games air, and the fact that the booker’s only client is ESPN and thus might as well be an ESPN employee, and all these shell companies… and …
a) I think there’s a lot more money than people realize in high school football… some of these programs are in million dolllars stadiums
and
b) I think ESPN is more involved than they’ve let on or has been discovered so far in this, and probably a lot of the other sports they air.
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There… FTFY
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Exactly this! I hope there’s followup to this story. What the hell is going on with this fake school?
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I always assumed it was money going out (and being wasted), not that there were also comparable inflows of money as well. Even if the inflows aren’t that great, I suppose they could provide perverse incentives to over-spend on high school athletics anyways. Ah, the whole thing is just perverse.
Oh, there’s definitely something seriously, seriously wrong with high school football in too much of this country, I’m just not sure by how many orders of magnitude that’s true…
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This reminds me a bit of the most lopsided matchup in college football history, when Georgia Tech beat Cumberland 222-0 in 1916. Apparently, Cumberland had disbanded its football program, but Georgia Tech held them to a contractual obligation to play the game. So somebody at Cumberland rounded up a bunch of frat boys and took them to play against what was then one of the best teams in the country. Georgia Tech scored on almost every play it ran.
My favorite story about the game is probably apocryphal, but supposedly at one point, a Cumberland player fumbled and shouted to a teammate to pick the ball up, to which his teammate supposedly replied, “You dropped it, you pick it up!”
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This is absolutely bizarre… like a high school being created out of thin air? This school doesn’t exist in the physical world. I dug around and read some articles with info from some of the players and it’s… I can’t describe how bizarre this is.
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espn fucked over Keith Olbermann too much for me to not hate them.
It’s a money making scheme. ESPN may even be in on it. Creating content.
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ESPN doesn’t properly vet a high school football team. Sony doesn’t properly vet the guy they tapped to replace Alex Trebek. Corporate America is really killing it lately!
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Their star quarterback
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The real team didn’t do any research on who they were playing before the game?
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It turns out they beat the crap out of the same team last year as well. So apparently everyone knew before the game and just didn’t care. Which makes espn’s claims that they were duped pretty tough to believe
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Hell, there’s a high school for kids with pro cycling ambition. You can bet there’s a bunch for mainstream sports.
I’m out of my depths here, because this isn’t the sort of thing I know about, but I’m confused as to how, in the extremely over-professionalized world of school football, a game was even scheduled with a fake team from a fake school that is apparently unknown by the Ohio High School Athletic Association.
I mean, I would have assumed, knowing as little as I do, that all IMG’s games were scheduled before the year even started. Do schools like this really not know who they’ll be playing next week?
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Sure, I get that. But it’s still bizarre the length’s the went to, the inability of those scammed to realize it, etc… etc…
I can’t speak for … the professional levels of high school football… but I can speak for high level select soccer teams. They often don’t know who they’re facing until the draws happen at the tournaments they attend. There MAY be a league that they compete locally in as well and those names will definitely be known in advance. But in the case of travelling teams, nope. You just travel, and you play whomever pays you.
IMG is made up of the top hs players in the country. They’ll be playing for the Alabamas and Ohio States’s next year.
Most of the fake school’s players couldn’t even get on at Abilene Christian or Robert Morris. So they join this “school” which calls itself a high school but doesn’t have to provide classes since the players are all hs grads or dropouts. Their hope was to transfer to a high-profile school I guess.
And apparently they never even practiced. Looks like the guy in charge just scammed money from a church to sponsor a fake school.
