At Charlotte, Biff Poggi has a blank canvas
Note: rankings for this series are set by TERSE, a D1 college football metric designed to imitate human rankings. These will shift as the offseason goes on, with more transfer data becoming available over time.
In a sport like college football, we don’t usually think about coaches in terms of likability. Stick around long enough and you’ll probably have, at the very least, overlooked some minor scandal or other. Those who don’t often find it difficult to keep a place in the D1 ranks; like any sport, it self-selects for the people who are able to turn a blind eye to its flaws. There are exceptions, but it’s certainly wise not to get attached to the image of an HC as a “good guy”. Don’t meet your heroes.
That being said, it seems reasonable to believe that Biff Poggi is one of the better people you’ll come across in FBS. He’s at once delightfully bizarre and deeply passionate; his Twitter profile picture is a blurry photo of an egg, of which he said “only the shadow knows” why he chose it. During an interview with ESPN’s Gene Wojciechowski back in 2018, while coaching at Saint Frances Academy in Baltimore, he eschewed talk of schemes and play calls in favor of discussing the inevitability of death and the casual racism prevalent in upper America.
It’s not hard to see why recruits like Poggi, between the Gen Z–style humor and the willingness to speak on complex topics, so much so that it took him just two years to get that high school recruiting on what their MIAA rivals complained was a college level. Even if meeting high school and college kids on their level wasn’t a great recruiting strategy—which, perhaps unsurprisingly, it is—Poggi seems like the kind of person to never have considered anything else. It’s not a pitch to get the players he needs; it’s the person he is. He’s built a small fortune as an investment funds manager, and the vast majority of his money has gone into the school and the football program at Saint Frances.
After 2020, Poggi handed off the program to Messay Hailemariam (who’s maintained their status near the top of the high school ranks) and joined Jim Harbaugh’s staff at Michigan. It’s no coincidence that the Wolverines immediately stepped up as a program, making back-to-back CFPs and breaking Ohio State’s stranglehold in The Game with dominant wins in both seasons. Members of the coaching staff credit his arrival as a key factor in the transformation, marking a shift in the way Harbaugh managed his coordinators and other assistants. A year after Poggi joined the team, OC Josh Gattis was named the top offensive coordinator in the country. And it wasn’t just the Wolverines that marked him as one of the sport’s brightest minds—no less an authority than Nick Saban said he would be “an absolute great choice to run a Division I program”.
A few weeks later, Charlotte decided that listening to the greatest coach in college football history would be smart, naming Poggi their third HC. The 49ers are still struggling to establish themselves in a sports-crowded region, especially as they enter an AAC in upheaval following a 29-62 run in Conference USA. As is true at so many schools, high potential and a lack of results have marked their athletic program thus far. But it’s easy to see how finding a place as an inner-city alternative to wealthy (often private) schools like UNC, NC State, Duke, Clemson, and South Carolina could position Charlotte for success in a conference with plenty of metropolitan programs.
It’s hard to think of a more perfect man for a team in this position than Poggi, who knows better than just about anybody how to build trust and excitement with recruits like those the 49ers hope to bring in. In Charlotte, he sees “a blank canvas”, a program searching for identity where he can build towards his vision of uplifting student-athletes without reservation. There’s never been a more exciting time in this team’s young history—and in the lengthy, remarkable career of one of football’s most admired coaches.
The Last Five Years
Despite their dismal 2022 season, the 49ers have built some success in their short history. The 2019 team overcame a 2-5 start with a five-game winning streak to reach their first-ever bowl, and in 2021 they stunned Duke for their first-ever win over a P5 opponent. They’ve recruited well for a team in their position, and the AAC saw enough potential underlying their poor record to add them starting in 2023.
2022 and 2023
While Poggi is obviously a very fitting hire for a team like Charlotte, it’s a bit of a rough break for Peter Rossomando that such a slam-dunk candidate was on the market. When Will Healy was fired after a 1-7 start, he took the reins and immediately blew the doors off 4-3 Rice on the road, winning by more in that game (33 points) than Healy had in five FBS wins across 2021 and 2022 combined. The 49ers finished 2-2 under Rossomando’s watch; he was subsequently hired by Lamar, his second head coaching job in FCS.
Charlotte only returns half its production from last season, though, ranking 120th in the country. Star running back and kick returner Shadrick Byrd, but veteran quarterback Chris Reynolds, top targets Grant DuBose and Elijah Spencer, and standout defenders Markees Watts and Amir Siddiq are all set to graduate. In response, the 49ers have added 18 recruits and 28 transfers, one of their largest incoming classes ever. We’ll see what Poggi does with these players down the road, but on-field expectations aren’t exactly high for an extremely Year Zero season.
The Next Five Years
It’s going to take time to build something at Charlotte. As at USF, there’s certainly investment in the program (the football stadium is being expanded as part of the university’s 2022 commitment to athletics), but as ever, it takes time for facilities, recruiting, and culture shift to take effect. Poggi is here for the long term, not to engineer an instant turnaround.
Of course, it’s not like anybody is looking to the 49ers to immediately turn things around, especially given how much turnover they’re undergoing amid a conference realignment. There aren’t any illusions about the state Charlotte is in, and Poggi knows that better than anybody. But he also knows that the talk of this program’s potential is far from empty, and that the recruits they’re pursuing are underserved in this region. If he builds it, they will come in droves.
It’s always a tricky balancing act to acknowledge that you can’t ever fully know someone in college football without descending into cynicism and falling out of love with the sport. But there are, amid all the charlatans who balance winning records atop scandal-ridden houses of cards, people who want the best for the student-athletes under them. Biff Poggi is one of those people, and both Charlotte’s nascent program and FBS as a whole are better for having him.