Mining for Gold with Sleeveless Biff Poggi – Charlotte Magazine

“That place,” Jim Harbaugh told Biff Poggi, “is an absolute gold mine.”

Poggi, then the associate head coach at Michigan and one of Harbaugh’s most trusted advisors, has made a life of trading blunt truths—he gives ’em and expects ’em in return—and this conversation, in fall 2022, was as frank as it got. Poggi told Harbaugh, his boss and now the head coach of the NFL’s Los Angeles Chargers, that UNC Charlotte had reached out through a search agency to gauge his interest in becoming its head football coach.

Poggi had done the same every time a school inquired, and every previous conversation had ended with a “nah.” But Charlotte was different, and Harbaugh knew it, so he didn’t hide the truth. Poggi loved being at Michigan—“I was very, very, very happy,” he says—but the more he looked at the opportunity, the more he liked the idea. It offered a chance to take over a young football program at a growing school in a growing metropolitan area with a powerful business community. And the offer came in a new era for college football, in which the door to prominence is wider than at any time in its history.

Poggi, who turned 64 in June, recognizes a potential high-return investment when he sees one. He built a financial empire away from the gridiron—he turned an initial $25,000 loan in 1986 into a hedge fund worth hundreds of millions—and wasn’t about to pass on this opportunity. He sees the potential in light of a pair of massive alterations to the sport’s infrastructure.

In 2018, the NCAA established the transfer portal, which freed college athletes to switch schools between seasons without having to sit out for a year, a longstanding requirement. That change allowed smaller and lower-profile programs like Charlotte’s to add immediate infusions of talent.

Three years later, a landmark U.S. Supreme Court ruling enabled amateur athletes to earn money through their NIL—Name, Image, Likeness—which means star players can cultivate attention and dollars even if they’re not playing for a high-profile team like, say, Michigan. “NIL is a real playing field-leveler,” says Sports Illustrated Senior Writer Pat Forde, who has covered college football for more than three decades. “The players still want to play, of course, but they’re less concerned with things like facilities and whether they’ll be on TV, because they’re all on TV. The equation has changed for programs that want to try to rise up.”

In Poggi’s second year, his mission is to make the 49ers truly Charlotte’s team—in the hearts of residents and the checkbooks of its financial titans. 

“Charlotte’s a very successful, very forward-looking, very wealthy town, and we are their university,” Poggi says. “It’s time now to build these relationships where these corporations are beginning to put philanthropic dollars toward the athletic programs at Charlotte. We don’t need to do what Memphis did, where FedEx gives them $25 million over five years. We don’t want to do that. But if those companies all give us a half-million dollars, we’re gonna win the league every year.”

He pauses for a half-second. 

“And we won’t be in this conference anymore,” he says. “We’ll be in a super-conference, which is where you’re going to have to wind up being anyway. It’s going to be the big conferences, and everybody else is going to struggle.”

Poggi is the third head coach in the Charlotte program’s history. (The post-World War II “extension center” that would evolve into the university fielded teams for three years in the late 1940s.) The 49ers played as an FCS independent for its first two seasons, 2013 and 2014. They ascended to the FBS’ Conference USA in 2015, then moved to the American Athletic Conference for the 2023 season. 

“It’s actually been a pretty steep growth curve. They’ve moved up very quickly in a decade’s time,” Forde says. “The promising things: You have an unbelievable number of quality players these days coming out of the Charlotte area, especially quarterbacks, and it seems like there’s an institutional commitment, too. They want to succeed, and they’re going to put in the resources and really take a swing at it.”

Programs outside the so-called “power conferences” can benefit from the College Football Playoff’s expansion from four to 12 teams and the chaos among conferences in the last few years. Three schools left the AAC in 2022. Last season’s conference champion, SMU, is now in the Atlantic Coast Conference—along with Stanford and Cal, joining Duke, N.C. State, and North Carolina. The Big 12 has added Cincinnati, Houston, and UCF. The Big Ten has 18 teams, and the Pac-12 no longer exists.

Poggi is the coach Charlotte hired not just to win football games but boost the university’s profile. It’s somewhat ironic that Poggi, with his nickname “Biff” and a signature sideline look of a sleeveless T-shirt with a deep-cut neckline, is the person chosen to raise the prestige level of a university with an enrollment north of 30,000 students.

In another way, it’s an inspired choice. Those students can, and do, buy sleeveless T-shirts at the campus bookstore. Poggi acknowledges: It’s part of his brand.

“He is a mold-breaker, for sure,” Forde says. “Everything about him is a bit unusual, from the name to his life path to where he is now.”

He’s had the nickname from birth. Born Francis Xavier Poggi, his mom told his older brother he could nickname the new baby. After Spike got nixed—“My mother said, ‘No, pick another’”—“Biff” stuck. 

Poggi owns suits and ties and nice clothes, of course, but he’s always been most comfortable in what you see him sport on Saturdays. Years ago, one of his investment bankers called and said he was bringing in the CEO of a business for a meeting. But that morning, Poggi tweaked his back working out. When the CEO arrived, Poggi was lying in the middle of his conference room wearing cutoff workout clothes. 

“We’re good friends now, so I’ve heard him tell this story a couple of times, how he walked in and thought, What in the hell have I gotten myself into?” Poggi, a Baltimore native, says with a laugh. “It’s always been what I wear. It’s not to make a statement. It’s just most comfortable for me. I run hot, and Charlotte is … I mean, I’ve known hot. Baltimore’s hot, but here? Dante’s Inferno has nothing on Charlotte as far as heat goes.”

Another difference: Poggi teaches a financial literacy course to his players. Not long after he arrived at Charlotte, he reached out to Director of Niner Finances Brad Yeckley to ask if he could design a course. Even though Poggi played at Pittsburgh and coached at Michigan, and Yeckley earned his Ph.D. from Penn State, Yeckley jumped at the chance. “As a Penn State alum, it was tough at first,” Yeckley says with a laugh. “But Biff is a great guy, and we both wear Charlotte green now.” 

Yeckley had created similar programs. “I’ve worked with a lot of Division I college coaches, and they’re all generally interested in the topic and helping their players, but Biff is the first coach I’ve worked with that came back and said, ‘Let’s do everything.’”

The program runs for 26 weeks and covers everything from personal budgets to evaluating NIL opportunities. “The kids absolutely love it,” Poggi says. “The first reason I do it: Every kid ought to know something about that. And second, it fits perfectly with this city. This city is the new banking capital in the country, and with all these Fortune 500 and Fortune 1000 companies here, we want to tie any type of philanthropy to internships.”

Poggi accepted the Charlotte job in November 2022 with the stipulation that he would finish out the season with his Wolverines, who were 10-0 at the time. Michigan pummeled rival Ohio State, 45-23, and beat Purdue to claim the Big Ten Championship—but lost to TCU in the Playoff semifinal on Dec. 31. 

Poggi started at Charlotte shortly thereafter, but with such a late start, recruiting was tough. This time around, with a full offseason, Poggi has gone all in on recruiting the area. The #stayhome hashtag he has on his Twitter/X bio was a big part of his recruiting this offseason. 

“Stay in the 704! Why go away?” he says. “First of all, your family can come watch every single day. And even if you’re a college player, and you were a Charlotte kid who left to go someplace else, but it’s not what you love, come back. This is your community.” 

Poggi and his staff have analyzed his potential players like he used to vet investment opportunities, and they have their pitch down pat. 

“I tell them, ‘You’ll never leave Charlotte,’” he says. “You’ll stay here forever, because this is Charlotte’s school. You’ll be here, you’ll have relationships in the community with these businesses, and you’re exactly the type of person that they want representing them. This is what we’re talking about.”

RYAN FAGAN is a longtime sportswriter who spent more than 18 years with The Sporting News, 10 of those living in Charlotte.