Charlotte 49ers just hired ‘the ultimate disruptor’ as their new head football coach
Say this for the Charlotte 49ers: They’re not afraid to take a chance.
The 49ers’ new football coach is 62 years old, slightly rumpled and has never been a head coach before at any collegiate level, although he is a high-level assistant at Michigan. He’s got a first name that sounds like the villain in the “Back to the Future” movies and a last name we’ll all need to learn to pronounce.
Biff Poggi (POE-jee) is the new Charlotte football coach’s name, and he doesn’t lack for confidence.
“Our goal is very simple,” Poggi said at his introductory news conference Monday. “We want to win the AAC (the American Athletic Conference, which is Charlotte’s new league as of 2023). And we want to win it repeatedly. And we want to get to the College Football Playoff. That’s why I left Michigan, and that’s what I’m expecting to do here. And you should be asking, ‘What’s your timetable?’ My timetable is now.”
Poggi hasn’t just coached football to the exclusion of everything else, as so many football coaches do. He’s independently wealthy. He could have already been retired and “doing whatever he wanted to do,” according to Charlotte 49ers athletic director Mike Hill. This, however, is what Poggi wants to do.
Poggi said Monday that when his first child was on the way that his financial whiz father-in-law taught him about the financial world to supplement his income and that later: “I started a hedge fund before that was known as an evil empire.”
That gives Poggi something in common with Dave Tepper, the Panthers and Charlotte FC owner, who made his billions as a hedge fund manager. Poggi said other people run that fund now, but its success has allowed him the financial freedom to make some unconventional career choices and also to fund a number of scholarships.
The Athletic recently said Poggi “may be the most interesting man in coaching right now.” Hill had a different title for him: “the ultimate disruptor.”
“I really see him as an accelerant to our program and a differentiator that we need as a young program,” Hill said. “We’re competing with 100-year-old football programs, you know. So how can we disrupt things? I see him as maybe the ultimate disruptor of the status quo.”
The status quo in college football is Charlotte’s enemy. The 49ers started their football program in 2013, which means it’s now been going for 10 years. In nine of those years, the 49ers have had a losing season. In the 10th, they went 7-6. They play in the smallest football stadium in the Football Bowl Subdivision (capacity of 15,314), and they don’t fill it up (averaging 10,907 fans in 2022). They just finished a 3-9 season. To say there is some room for improvement is an understatement. They don’t need the status quo. They need some disrupting.
Charlotte needs better players, more money and more interest. Those aren’t uncommon needs across the football landscape, but they’ve hired an uncommon man to try to get them further up the ladder. I’ve been to a lot of introductory press conferences, and this was the first one in which the new head coach threw around the word “domicile” and the phrase “derivative strategy in equities.”
But make no mistake — Poggi isn’t a pencil pusher. He looks much more like a football coach than a hedge-fund manager, especially when describing how he plans to better Charlotte’s defense.
“Look, we were (ranked) 130 out of 131 on defense,” Poggi said. “The last time I checked, you can’t win games like that. So we’re going to stop the run on defense. We’re going to make you one-dimensional so you have to throw the football. And then we’re going to light you up.”
There’s an old theory in coaching hires, of course, that goes something like this: You always hire the opposite of the guy you just fired. The 49ers last employed Will Healy, who was only 33 when he got the job. Healy was offensive-minded and he already had experience as a collegiate head coach, albeit at a lower level. He lasted a little less than four seasons before being fired in October.
Poggi seems to be Healy’s opposite in a number of ways and certainly in age. But he also has charisma, as Healy did, and he also will have many of the same challenges. The best players in North Carolina usually go to one of the big ACC or SEC schools. Charlotte has gotten very few of them, and has too often been out-talented on the field.
Healy was a stereotypical hire: a young offensive “genius” who was supposed to be on his way up. Poggi isn’t a stereotypical hire. By the time he rebuilds the 49ers program — or “reshapes” it, to use his word — he’ll be in his mid-60s.
Said Poggi of his hiring: “It took guts, it’s a little bit outside the box and I thank you very much for it.”
For the 49ers, this seems like a shot worth taking. And if it doesn’t work out, maybe they can at least hit Poggi up for a sizable donation.
