Biff Poggi’s freshman quarterback was finding new ways to be bad. Yes, he’d been thrust into action for the University of North Carolina at Charlotte 49ers three games into the season. Yes, his 6-foot-4, NFL-worthy frame and golden right arm are hard to deny.
But on the night of September 14, in a better-win-it kind of game against Gardner-Webb University, he would have tested the patience of any coach, much less one with just as much to prove.
Yet Poggi—the 64-year-old known mostly for his high school coaching career, a propensity for wearing cutoff T-shirts, and the money he’s made as a hedge fund manager—never flinched.
When Deshawn Purdie got sacked and fumbled, Poggi paced. Another sack, another fumble? Poggi walked some more. When Purdie threw an interception that was returned for a touchdown and a 10-0 Gardner-Webb lead, thumps and bumps could be heard from the direction of the Charlotte assistant coaches’ box atop the stands.
But Poggi? He still had his headset firmly atop his head, demeanor cool, feet moving. “I want to know how many miles I walked today,” Poggi said after the game, looking down at his Apple Watch. “Ten miles.”
It was hard to tell if he was joking.
Poggi’s gasket never blew. Not even after Purdie took a knee instead of spiking the ball, with the clock winding down in the second quarter, costing his team precious time, yardage, and probably four points.
Poggi never got in Purdie’s face, either. The only obvious exchange between the two on a crowded 49ers sideline came after an injury put a merciful end to Purdie’s night late in the third quarter. Poggi sat down next to him on the bench.
Then Purdie put his arm around Poggi’s shoulders and leaned in to say something.
“I’m so sorry, Coach,” Purdie said, according to Poggi.
“For what?” Poggi recalled saying. “For being a complete warrior and a stud that we could start you as a freshman? And this game isn’t over.”
The National Spotlight
This is Poggi’s second season in Charlotte after a distinguished and sometimes controversial high school coaching career in Baltimore that attracted national attention. He was a leading character in the best-selling book Season of Life: A Football Star, a Boy, a Journey to Manhood, which is about one of his 19 seasons at the elite, all-boys Gilman School, where he won more football games than any coach in school history.
He also was featured in an HBO documentary after he moved to St. Frances Academy and built the predominantly Black Catholic high school in a rough area of Baltimore into a national power.
Following two stints as an assistant at the University of Michigan, Poggi landed in late 2022 at Charlotte, which had restarted its football program only a decade earlier. (The university was officially founded in 1949, hence the nickname, but it fielded a football team from 1946 to 1948 when it was called the “Charlotte Center of the University of North Carolina.”)
The new team began at a lower level of competition, the Football Championship Subdivision (formerly Division I-AA), in 2013 and moved up two years later to the highest level, the Football Bowl Subdivision, where it’s had just one winning season. The 49ers have won 45 games and lost 89. Poggi’s first Charlotte team went 3-9, and this year’s team is 3-6 with three games remaining.
“He’s one of the most interesting characters in college football, for sure, which has brought decent media attention to UNC-Charlotte,” said Daniel Brackett, a 2022 alum who attended the game against Gardner-Webb. “But at the end of the day, it’s a winning game. And if you don’t win, then you’re done.”
The Assembly interviewed more than a dozen people associated with Poggi and his programs at UNC-Charlotte, Gilman, and Michigan for this article and attended two of Poggi’s regularly scheduled press conferences, one game, and a team practice. The Charlotte athletics staff said it was unable to arrange a one-on-one interview with Poggi during the football season.
To his players then and now, Poggi comes off as both hard-nosed and empathetic. He grew up the son of Italian immigrants in a part of Baltimore known as “Little Italy.”
His father was a pharmacist in a low-income area and had a reputation for extending lines of credit when customers fell on hard times. Poggi once said he was kicked out of school eight times by his junior year in high school for fighting, cutting class, and other bad behavior.
“Without God using the game (of football) in my life, I would be in prison or dead,” he said in the HBO documentary The Cost of Winning.
Only after Poggi was offered a scholarship to the Gilman School did the trajectory of his life change. He earned a football scholarship to the University of Pittsburgh and ultimately transferred to Duke University, where he met his wife, Amy. They’ve raised five children.
“He’s one of the most interesting characters in college football, for sure … But at the end of the day, it’s a winning game. And if you don’t win, then you’re done.”
Daniel Brackett, UNC-Charlotte alum
Under the tutelage of his father-in-law, who was his first investor, Poggi created an investment firm in 1986 that reportedly grew to a net worth of more than $100 million before he turned over its day-to-day operations to focus on coaching.
“At the root of who he is, he’s always been trying to do well financially to be able to help young Biff,” said former Gilman player Napoleon Sykes. “He latches on to some kids the hardest because that’s who he was. He didn’t have the straight line to success some people have. It’s the fatal flaw of the hero; he wants to help and save as many kids as he can. And that’s tough.”
Poggi left Gilman after a disagreement with the administration over the number and scope of scholarships he could extend football recruits, not to mention a growing divide between the football program and the rest of the student body.
He spent a year as an analyst for the football program at the University of Michigan in 2016, where his son Henry played fullback, before landing back in Baltimore at a school with much greater needs than Gilman.
St. Frances only had a football program because Poggi, who’d been invited to sit on the board while still coaching at Gilman, donated $60,000 to start one about a decade before he became coach at the school, which has a high percentage of poor and Black students.
As coach at St. Frances, Poggi funded dozens of scholarships for players, salaries for teachers, and room and board for as many as 40 players he recruited from out of town or in need of safer living arrangements. Within a year, he had turned its football program into a national powerhouse. But local teams, who had been trounced by St. Frances, refused to play them over “safety” concerns; some suspected race was a factor.
The controversy put Poggi in the national spotlight.
“Sounds like he’s got the best team money can buy to inflate his ego,” read one tweet, which was shared on the HBO documentary. Another tweet compared Poggi to a “slave owner of black athletes.”
One word that seems to follow Poggi is “polarizing.” It’s a description that perplexes Jeffrey Marx, author of the 2003 book that chronicled a season with Poggi and the Gilman Greyhounds.
“If you tell me there’s someone who doesn’t like Biff Poggi, then I’ll tell you that’s someone who doesn’t know Biff Poggi,” Marx said. “He enjoys winning, but he enjoys impacting lives a whole lot more than winning. There are some people who love that and celebrate him for that, and there are others who might have different opinions about Biff.”
He paused.
“Often, not only in sports, but in life, it is the visionary who takes not only the standing ovations but the arrows as well,” Marx said. “Not everyone always agrees with the visionary. Biff is a visionary.”
Poggi returned to Michigan in 2021 when he joined coach Jim Harbaugh’s staff as an associate head coach and special adviser. Unlike the usual trajectory up the assistant coaching ranks, Poggi got to guru without passing go.
“He personifies being a football guy,” Harbaugh said recently at a news conference. “The extra benefit with Biff is he’s a person that truly extends himself for other people.”
Poggi’s two-year stint helped springboard Michigan to a national championship, Harbaugh to the NFL’s Los Angeles Chargers, and Poggi to his first college head coaching job at Charlotte. Charlotte athletics director Mike Hill has described him as a “disrupter of the status quo.”
According to student podcaster Blake Rose, Poggi is known to drive a Bentley onto the Charlotte campus. He often flies by private jet. Yet he’s known for wearing athletic wear with the sleeves and neckline cut off, even to a speaking engagement with the Charlotte Rotary Club.
He insists his players take financial literacy classes. He arranges summer internships for upperclassmen with Charlotte-area businesses. His players call him by his nickname—which Poggi’s brother coined shortly after he was born as Francis Xavier Poggi—or simply “Coach Biff.” One of them, on a recent Tuesday morning, felt comfortable napping on Poggi’s office couch.
Poggi is a man you can’t shoehorn into any category. In a way, UNC-Charlotte is the same. This is a school with the third largest student body in the state, behind N.C. State University and UNC-Chapel Hill.
But its football program is still developing an identity and set of traditions. Six major conference football schools are within a three-hour radius, all of which started playing football in the 1800s.
In 2021, the Charlotte 49ers, previously known as the UNCC 49ers, rebranded themselves in an attempt to avoid being confused with UNC-Chapel Hill and to shed a reputation as a commuter school.
“(The campus) was just far enough away from downtown (Charlotte) to sometimes be an afterthought–not fairly, but it was,” said Jason Saine, a UNC-Charlotte graduate and former state legislator. He advocated for $25 million in the current two-year state budget toward the expansion of Charlotte’s football stadium, among other projects.
“It’s not like a NC State that’s right in the middle of Raleigh,” he said. “It was just growing slowly and quietly all on its own. It’s always involved and engaged with the greater region, but it’s almost like we’ve caught fire as a university overnight.”
“The extra benefit with Biff is he’s a person that truly extends himself for other people. Let’s face it–the guy’s close to a billionaire but was coaching high school football.”
Jim Harbaugh, Los Angles Chargers head coach
In April, the UNC Board of Governors approved a $60 million expansion to the 49ers’ Jerry Richardson Stadium that will increase capacity by nearly 3,000 seats to 18,170, including luxury suites and other amenities. A second phase would increase seating to 21,000, which would still be one of the smallest stadiums among teams who play in the Football Bowl Subdivision.
The expansion of facilities is just one way Charlotte is trying to raise its profile.
The 49ers compete with ACC and SEC schools for the top talent in the Carolinas. And they’re competing with the Carolina Panthers, Charlotte Hornets, and Charlotte FC for fan dollars and media attention.
Charlotte plays in the American Athletic Conference, which includes Army, Navy, Tulane, Rice, and Memphis. East Carolina is Charlotte’s only natural geographic rival in the conference.
Poggi made his first big waves as coach at Charlotte at a preseason media event last year after he went viral for criticizing the assembled media for projecting his team to finish last in its first year in the conference. His mood turned sour after he was asked only three questions.
“That’s it? Three questions?” he said. “Maybe that’s because you have us ranked last. That’s all what you think of us. So we get that message. Thank you.” He pounded the dais a couple of times for emphasis.
The media forecast was not far off. Charlotte lost six of eight conference games last year and finished in next-to-last place. If nothing else, though, the man commands attention. The Charlotte 49ers need an identity. Poggi is brimming with it.
‘To Love Each Other’
In 2001, the writer Marx began shadowing the Gilman team. He was a former ballboy for the Baltimore Colts and had reconnected with Joe Ehrmann, a former Colts defensive end, who was then Poggi’s right-hand man at Gilman.
Marx was intrigued by their coaching philosophy, which crystallized for him in an exchange between Poggi and the players at one of the first practices.
“What is our job?” Poggi said, nodding toward his fellow coaches.
“To love us,” players responded.
“What is your job?” Poggi said.
“To love each other,” they answered.
Love was a regular part of the vernacular between football coaches and a group of musclebound, testosterone-charged teenage boys?
Marx knew he was onto something unique. Six of the biggest publishers in New York took a pass on his book proposal. “I don’t think people understood it, honestly,” he says now. But he felt strongly enough to self-publish. The book sold so well, Simon & Schuster bought the rights and reissued it. Season of Life became a New York Times bestseller.
One of the most poignant scenes in the book was when Sykes, then a senior wide receiver, found out his best friend and neighbor had been in a car accident, hit by a drunk driver. Poggi and Ehrmann met him at his friend’s hospital bedside and prayed with him just hours before his friend died.
Months later, halfway through that 2001 season, Sykes stood deep in Gilman territory ready to receive a kickoff against the team his friend should have been playing for, Mount St. Joseph. With tears filling his eyes, he managed to catch the ball and return it as far as the 31-yard line. But struggling to see, he found the sideline and took himself out of the game.
“I made it to the sideline somehow, and Biff, Joe and three or four coaches immediately swarmed me,” Sykes said. “In the middle of a football game, to have coaches immediately come over, knowing they needed to sit you down and talk to you because something wasn’t right.”
Poggi, a Catholic turned evangelical, put his arm around Sykes and kneeled to pray, asking that Sykes be “released from the pain and anger he is feeling … to perform in memory of his friend.”
Shortly after Sykes went back into the game, he made an interception and returned it 67 yards to set up Gilman’s first touchdown in a game it would win. Sykes took home a game ball and a lifetime memory.
Sykes went on to play football at Wake Forest University and is now in his fourth year as head football coach at The Lawrenceville School in New Jersey, an elite boarding school outside Philadelphia. He gives his players an emotionally safe space, taking pride in the number who have come into his office and “wept,” he said.
“The culture we’ve created here allows young men to feel that way,” he said. “When you feel validated and you also feel loved, then you can feel vulnerable and let your guard down.”
Calling Poggi
Ambrose Wooden knows a thing or two about playing quarterback for Poggi. He played the position for three years at Gilman. And he has a pretty good idea why Poggi kept his cool with Purdie through his struggles against Gardner-Webb.
“He knows his kids will make mistakes on the field; mental mistakes, physical mistakes, that’s going to happen,” Wooden said. “If you want to see Biff lose his composure, be late to a meeting, or do something wrong to a woman. Those are things Biff cares about. Wins and losses are great. Biff cares about building character, integrity, as he says ‘building men for others’–that is his focus.”
Wooden grew up in inner-city Baltimore. His father drove a city bus, and his mom was an accountant. His parents were not together, but both were involved in his life. He and his father used to drive past the neatly manicured Gilman campus nearly every weekend, and his dad always said the same thing: “I wish I could afford to send you there.”
Poggi and the Gilman coaches first saw Wooden play as a 11-year-old in recreational football. By the start of ninth grade, Poggi had offered him the chance to play at Gilman. Poggi was prepared to foot the part of the bill financial aid did not cover.
Wooden was an A student in the eighth grade at Baltimore City Schools but testing at a seventh-grade level. He struggled with the Gilman entrance exam. Even with months of tutoring, his only choice to get into Gilman was to repeat the eighth grade. So he did.
He remembers Poggi teaching him about effort through Jesus’ Parable of the Talents, about being a gentleman by insisting players introduce their dates to Poggi at school dances, and about finance with hands-on experience in summer internships. Wooden interned every summer with Samuel James Limited, Poggi’s family firm.
In Wooden’s senior year in 2002, Gilman went 10-0 and earned a No. 14 national ranking by USA Today. Poggi had the seniors write their own eulogies and read them to the team, “To make you think about what people will say about you when you leave this earth,” Wooden said.
Wooden played at Notre Dame and then went to Wall Street. He worked for Goldman Sachs for 13 years and now is an executive director for J.P. Morgan. He and his wife had twin boys in February.
“An inner-city kid from East Baltimore ends up marrying an Australian woman from the suburbs of Sydney,” Wooden said. “Who would have thought?”
He still strives to live up to the words he wrote for his eulogy, about being a good father, a good husband, a good son. He aims to live by Poggi’s go-to Bible verse, Isaiah 1:17: “Take up the cause of the fatherless; plead the case of the widow,” by serving on the boards of several nonprofits.
And Wooden still calls Poggi when he has a big decision to make.
Another Chance For Purdie
Poggi was right when he told his freshman quarterback, Purdie, the game against Gardner-Webb wasn’t over. Trexler Ivey came off the bench in the fourth quarter to complete 11 of 12 passes, two of them for touchdowns, and lead the 49ers to a 27-26 win. It was the 49ers’ largest comeback since moving up to the Football Bowl Subdivision in 2015.
When asked afterward if Ivey, a junior, was going to be his quarterback going forward, Poggi said, “If Purdie’s healthy, we’ll go with Purdie.”
“Deshawn is a special kid, wonderful kid,” Poggi said. “We expected some bumps. We didn’t expect what happened today. But he’s a supreme talent, and if any of our fans do not see that, and if they take that kid over the coals, then I’ve got one rule: They’ve got to come into my office and do it in front of me because I’ll have a stack full of bail money to get me out.”
Some fans did not appreciate the tone or the implication.
“Biff? More like buffoon,” one 49ers fan noted on X. Another wrote, “This high school guidance counselor has no business being an FBS head coach.”
Two weeks later, though, the decision to stick by Purdie looked judicious. With Ivey struggling against Rice, Poggi brought Purdie in to start the second half. He passed for 183 yards and two touchdowns, without an interception, to lead the 49ers to a 21-20 come-from-behind win.
The following week against rival East Carolina, Purdie passed for 206 yards in a 55-24 romp. Poggi found something to do on the sideline besides pacing.
“Do you want to know what I did all day today on the sideline?” he asked the assembled media afterward. “Anybody want to guess?”
Poggi pulled out two laminated pages bound together by a metal ring. “These are scripture verses that I had my assistant laminate, and I prayed these all game,” he said. “And our players knew it, wanted it, and are on fire.”
Poggi calls his work at Charlotte a ministry. His former players say the impact of his love-first coaching philosophy is undeniable.
As for the question of whether he will win at the college level?
“What we’re trying to do here is help change the trajectory of their lives,” Poggi said a few days after the Gardner-Webb game.
He wants his players to get a degree and find something for the next 50 years that they love more than football. He wants them to learn how to become good men, good sons, good husbands, good fathers, and good citizens. He wants them to understand that’s what matters.
“Unfortunately, there’s a lot of money involved in college sports now, so there’s a short fuse on all that,” he said. “You’ve got to win, or you don’t have the chance to do that. I really try to focus on the mission, and I let the scoreboard reflect the scoreboard.”
Carroll Walton is a freelance writer based in Charlotte. She was a longtime baseball writer for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution and co-author of “Ballplayer,” a biography of former Atlanta Braves third baseman Chipper Jones.
