BIFF BAM POW: Can a 64-year-old hedge-fund veteran be the superhero of Charlotte football?

• Author: Mitchell, Tucker

Francis X. "Biff" Poggi's first spring as UNC Charlottes football coach was not going as smoothly as hoped.

The former hedge fund manager and Maryland high school football coaching legend was a few weeks into spring practice, and his team looked like it might be falling apart. The 49ers had three identifiable factions: holdovers from last year's team; college transfers who had played for Poggi at St. Frances Academy in Baltimore; and transfers from somewhere else. They were at each others throats.

Tension was disrupting practice and handcuffing Poggi as he tried to assemble a first team. Fights broke out several days in a row, culminating in a battle that witnesses called an "absolute brawl." The hyper-competitive Poggi lost his cool.

Alter order was restored, he sent everyone to the locker room except for the players.

This is not the kind of team we are going to be, the coach told his team before ordering a seemingly endless series of sprints back and forth across the field. Gassers, they're called. The 49ers ran them until they dropped.

A team meeting followed. Poggi confronted the situation with brutal honesty and sincere concern--his coaching calling card. Issues were addressed. It got emotional.

The problem was solved and the players learned that they were playing for an uncommon coach, one with real ability to lead and inspire.

"Things get very real very quickly with him," says Jonathon Jacobson, a successful Boston money manager who Poggi hired as assistant head coach and special adviser. "When it comes to coaching football, Biff has that secret sauce. He really does."

Pivotal moment

Charlotte--the athletic brand name for the UNC system campus in the Queen City--hopes Poggi's sauce will turn 49er football into a tasty, lucrative dish. Leadership, in turn, is counting on football to increase the school's visibility and boost Charlotte's national stature as a top urban research university. Like it or not, these days a big-name athletic program can do just that.

The school hired Poggi (pronounced Poh-JEE) last December after nine lackluster seasons since the university agreed to add Division I football in 2008. (Games started in 2013.)

Lackluster might be charitable. The football 49ers have had one winning season, averaging fewer than four victories a year. The program's signature victory is a 2021 win over a mediocre Duke team that dumped its coach later that year.

Gene Johnson, a former telecom company CEO and leading UNC Charlotte booster, says, "You can say our football program has had limited success."

The university hopes that is about to change as it approaches a pivotal moment. Despite Charlottes football record, the American Athletic Conference gladly accepted it to join East Carolina University and 12 other member-schools, starting this year. The AAC is considered more prestigious than Conference USA, Charlotte's previous affiliation. Its football reputation is, by most accounting, below the Power 5 conferences that dominate college sports: the ACC, Big 10, Big 12, Pac 12 and SEC.

The university has a $ 102 million campaign to raise funds for, among other things, the expansion of 15,300-seat Richardson Stadium on the Charlotte campus.

And, it has Biff Poggi, 64, as its coach.

He's not a household name in North Carolina, but he qualifies as a semi-legend in his native Baltimore, where locals still marvel at the unlikely story of an investing guru who became a hotshot high school football coach and then a key assistant to Jim Harbaugh at Michigan. Poggi is compelling enough to have been featured in the New York Times bestseller "Season of Life: A Football Star, a Boy, a Journey to Manhood" and in a four-part HBO series that aired in 2020. Now, ESPN is preparing a longer series Poggi's new job, slated to start in September..

Poggi played football at Pittsburgh for a couple of years, then transferred to Duke, where he graduated in 1984. Poggi began a career as a low-level college coach and then a high school coach and teacher but veered into financial services after his father-in-law, Joseph Mix, told Poggi he doubted that high school football pay could create the lifestyle he expected for his daughter, Amelia.

Aided by private investing lessons and an initial $25,000 stake from Mix, a successful global...