New Charlotte coach Biff Poggi has no time for a slow rebuild. But can 49ers win quickly?

Biff Poggi, the new Charlotte 49ers head football coach, is not afraid to dream big.

When I asked Poggi what he would consider a successful first season for his first 49ers team, which is coming off a 3-9 season that got the previous coach fired, Poggi said: “What I think is realistic is to compete for the conference title.”

Really? In your first year in the American Athletic Conference? With a team that ranked 129th out of 131 Football Championship Subdivision teams in scoring defense last season?

“If we’re not in the hunt,” Poggi said firmly, “then I’ve failed as a coach. We’ve got really good players. We’ve got really good young coaches….. But I’ve never won a college football game as a head coach. So we’re going to find out if Mike Hill made a huge mistake or not.”

Mike Hill is the 49ers’ athletic director and the person most responsible for this out-of-the-box hiring. Rather than grabbing the latest hot young offensive coordinator, Hill went for the rumpled old guy who few casual college football fans had heard of six months ago.

“We needed a disruptor of the status quo for a 10-year-old football program,” Hill said, “that is competing against programs much older and much more mature. We needed an accelerant.”

Poggi and I sat down for an interview in his office this past week to talk about his plans for the 49ers and what brought him to Charlotte. It’s not your typical coaching story.

Poggi (pronounced POE-jee) grew up in Baltimore. He said he went to eight schools by the time he was in 11th grade “because I was a rotten kid.” He played college football, graduated from Duke with a history degree (“one of the most disappointing degrees Duke probably ever handed out,” he chuckled). He made himself personally rich by starting a hedge fund, won a ton of state championships as a high school football coach in Maryland and was Jim Harbaugh’s right-hand man, associate head coach and consigliere at the University of Michigan.

But Poggi has never been a college head coach.

And at 62, at an age where most coaches are starting to wind up their careers, he’s starting something brand new. Which is admirable, but also risky.

Regarding his age — and Poggi turns 63 in June — the coach likes to joke about it himself before anyone else can. He said anyone watching a 49ers practice probably wonders: “Who is that old man out there, wandering around?”

As for the fact he’s triple the age of most of his players?

“The kids must think, ‘Oh, this guy is getting ready to have his bowl of oatmeal,’” he laughed.

But make no mistake, Poggi has a relentless energy. The man that The Athletic called “the most interesting man in coaching” in November has already put his fingerprints on every aspect of the Charlotte program.

The 49ers hold their spring football game at 7 p.m. April 22 (admission is free, gates open at 6 pm). It will be fans’ first chance to see what Poggi’s on-the-fly remake of the 49ers looks like.

And it truly is a remake.

Charlotte has approximately 40 new players, including 15 transfers from Power Five programs. And although Poggi’s hedge fund/football coach combo sounds quite new school, his old-school team will look a lot more like what you’d think would be produced by a player who played offensive tackle in college (first for Pittsburgh, where he blocked for Dan Marino, and then for Duke).

“The program needed bigger, faster, more physical players,” Poggi said. “The program needed players that were used to playing at a higher level of competition. And the program needed a toughness and a competitiveness that when I watched last year’s tape, I didn’t see.”

55-54? Uh, no

Poggi’s twin No. 1 priorities could come straight from a Vince Lombardi playbook: Running the ball and stopping the run.

“I know the world now is Air Raid and spread offenses and let’s win every game 55-54,” Poggi said.

Michigan isn’t that way under Harbaugh, however. And that heavily influenced Poggi, who was Harbaugh’s associate head coach at Michigan when the Wolverines made it to the College Football Playoff last year and doesn’t want Charlotte to be that way.

When I asked Poggi what would be an ideal score for the 49ers to win a game by, the coach replied: “I’d say 17-3. Maybe 17-6.”

That sounds boring, right? But Charlotte fans would gladly take it over an opposing offense simply running the ball down the 49ers’ throats every game.

When Will Healy was fired in October as Charlotte’s head coach, he had a 1-7 record and was in his fourth season at the helm. These were the number of points Charlotte had given up in the first eight games of 2022:

43, 41, 56, 41, 56, 41, 34 and 34.

It got a little better after that. But Charlotte still allowed 39.4 points per game in 2022, which was third-worst among the 131 schools in college football’s highest division. If you had lined up in the opposing backfield, you would have averaged six yards a carry. The holes were gaping, and the 49ers’ defense too often got manhandled.

Perhaps it was no wonder that Charlotte’s stadium — although already the smallest at the FBS level with a capacity of 15,314 — often looked half-empty, especially after halftime when a lot of the students decided they’d had about enough.

The 49ers are raising money right now at the school to improve the athletic facilities, and part of that will be doubling the stadium’s capacity to 30,000 seats down the road. But Poggi said he isn’t worried about the number of fans Jerry Richardson Stadium can hold.

“What needs to be the focus right now is putting an excellent product on the field,” Poggi said. “If we put an excellent product on the field, we will have as big of a stadium as we can imagine, because there’s lots of financial power in this town. But I think it’s fair to say, ‘Who wants to write a huge check if the team’s no good?’”

No time for ‘long rebuild’

The team, unfortunately, has not been much good for most of its existence. In 10 college football seasons, Charlotte has had nine losing seasons and has an all-time record of 39-74. The only winning mark came in 2019 under Healy, when the 49ers went 7-6. There have been some high moments — the first game in 2013, the Bahamas Bowl in 2019, the win at home against Duke in 2021 — but not enough of them.

Poggi plans to change all that, and quickly. He has a five-year contract but wants to do it faster. Said Hill: “One of the things that stood out to me was he said, ‘Mike, I’m 62 years old. I don’t have time for a long rebuild.’”

The American Athletic Conference, Charlotte’s new home for athletics after its hopscotch out of Conference USA, will have 14 football teams in 2023. In seven of the past nine seasons of the CFP era, the AAC has placed a team in the New Year’s Six series of bowl games. Six times in the past nine seasons, an AAC team has finished in the national top 10.

In other words, it won’t be easy to win the league.

But if you do, starting in 2024 when the CFP expands from four teams to a dozen, there’s a very high probability that the AAC champion will earn one of the 12 playoff berths. Could you ever see the 49ers — whose only postseason berth was that loss in the Bahamas Bowl — in the actual CFP at some point in the 2020s?

“If we don’t make it, I’ll be disappointed,” Poggi said. “And it will be clearly, squarely my fault.”

Replacing the quarterback

Among Poggi’s more interesting concepts this season is how he plans to replace quarterback Chris Reynolds, who started for the 49ers for their entire 10-year existence (not really, but it seemed that way).

When I asked Poggi how close he was to finding his next quarterback, the coach proclaimed: “Got ‘em. Got three of ‘em that I love, and I’m going to play ‘em all.”

So returnees James Foster and Xavier Williams will split time with transfer Jalon Jones at the game’s most important position. Jones played for Saint Frances, a private high school in Poggi’s hometown of Baltimore. Poggi founded and led the prep football program there, including personally funding 65 scholarships (paid for largely by the money Poggi made with his hedge fund, which he still keeps tabs on but which is run by somebody else).

“I coached at Saint Frances for the same reason I’m coaching here,” Poggi said. “I want to change the trajectory of the lives of our kids.”

Poggi also said he wants his players to understand that the “playing football” part of their lives ends relatively soon and to use football as a means to an end. With the help of his staff, he is making a course on financial literacy mandatory for all of them and trying to procure internships in the business world for as many as he can.

“I want them to start thinking about something they love as much or more than football for the next 50 years of their lives,” Poggi said. “.... Tom Brady is an anomaly. You’re not going to play much past your late 20s, and that’s if you’re really good. And most players don’t make multi-generational wealth. So you have to do something else to be a productive member of society. I want to see (Charlotte players) in 20 years, if I’m still around, with their wives and their kids and their careers. And to know what they are doing to help to give back to the city of Charlotte, or wherever they’re living, with people who have less than they have.”

The back nine of life

That’s a long-term goal, but a lot of Poggi’s coaching life is about the short term right now. The 49ers’ practice on the day we met had been spotty in places, and so Poggi lobbed in another “old guy” joke as he dissected it.

“I tell the team all the time, I’m playing the back nine of life,” Poggi said. “I’m on (hole number) 16. After today, I feel like I’m teeing off on the 18th.”

But Poggi’s self-deprecation masks a tremendous drive, Hill said.

“I’ve already learned never to doubt Biff,” the athletic director said.

And it is true Poggi has more believers than you might expect. Alabama coach Nick Saban supplied a quote to the Charlotte 49ers when they hired Poggi in November that read in part: “Biff Poggi will generate excitement and success for the program. The players will love playing for him and the coaches will love working with him. Get ready to win!”

Winning will be what it takes for Poggi to convince the 49ers faithful. They’ve been burned before. But he has no doubt it’s going to work.

“Look, we killed it in recruiting this year,” Poggi said. “I’m not saying we’re great recruiters. I’m saying what Jim Harbaugh said to me when I got offered the job. He said, ‘Have you ever been there?’ and when I said I hadn’t, he said, ‘That place is a gold mine.’”

As people who understand Charlotte’s history know, that is quite literally true.

Now Poggi just has to get out a shovel and find the right place to dig.