It was late summer 2021. Michigan was coming off of a 2-4 season where just one of those four losses was by single digits. Jim Harbaugh was on the hottest seat in the country; he already had taken a pay cut. The Wolverines were predicted by the media to finish fourth in the Big Ten East Division, behind Indiana.
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Many expected that the 2021 season would be Harbaugh’s last at his alma mater. What has happened since then has been the biggest turnaround in college football.
A team that no one outside of Ann Arbor figured would crack the top 10 smashed Ohio State, won its first Big Ten title in 17 years and made the College Football Playoff. And perhaps even more surprising is what’s happening in the Big Ten this year.
Though Michigan lost three first-round NFL Draft picks, had to replace both of its coordinators and almost saw Harbaugh leave for the NFL on national signing day, the Wolverines keep blowing teams off the field. Since the start of the 2021 season, they are 21-2 (14-1 in the Big Ten) and getting better by the week.
So what the heck changed in Ann Arbor?
It started with Harbaugh hiring a more energetic staff in 2021, including six new assistants. But ask folks inside the program, and they’ll point to the arrival of one staffer in particular.
He’s a guy even the most die-hard fans probably wouldn’t recognize. His name is Biff. He’s 62, and he may be the most interesting man in coaching right now.
“I think Biff’s presence there is huge,” says Baltimore Ravens defensive coordinator Mike Macdonald, who ran the Wolverines defense in 2021. “He’s kind of like the consigliere. He’s really the only guy that is willing to hash it out with (Harbaugh).”
[Biff Poggi expected to take Charlotte job]
Francis “Biff” Poggi’s (“Poe-GEE”) official title is associate head football coach, which means he has numerous roles. During Michigan State week, when Harbaugh was in San Francisco being honored by the 49ers, the team he led to the Super Bowl in 2012, Poggi ran Michigan’s Sunday practice. He serves as a sounding board for players round the clock, helping them navigate injuries, family issues or other concerns. But where Poggi has proven most invaluable to the program is in helping coach the Wolverines coaches.
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Macdonald, now 34, was in his first season as a coordinator and had joined the Michigan staff after having worked with John Harbaugh in Baltimore. “I leaned on (Poggi) tremendously, whether it was his advice on how to handle certain situations or how he’d get things done, program-wise,” Macdonald said. “He was an incredible asset to me, quite frankly.
“He doesn’t sugarcoat sh–, and you learn to appreciate that about him. He knows what buttons to push. He knew when to gas me up to give me confidence, and he knew when to sit me down to give me advice. He just knows. It’s like, ‘Damn, this guy is the godfather.'”
Josh Gattis, Michigan’s offensive coordinator in 2021, also leaned on Poggi heavily last year. Gattis was one of the few holdovers going into the 2021 season, and was trying to jell with a new offensive line coach, new tight ends coach, new running backs coach and new quarterback coach. The young OC had a memorable introduction to Poggi.
I’m here to figure out if you’re part of the problem or part of the solution, Gattis recalls Poggi telling him. “He was that blunt. He’ll call you out — if you’re not managing people right or managing situations. He’s genuinely there for the betterment of Jim and the program. His heart is all in it.”
Poggi was hired in July 2021 and made a point of spending his first few days in the office observing the Wolverines offensive staff room. He had been on the Michigan staff in 2016, Harbaugh’s second season, but there were no holdovers from that group on the offensive side of the ball. He watched how Gattis and his assistants interacted and quickly detected a clear division in the room between the coaches who were with Gattis and those who were not.
“It was shocking how apparent that was,” Poggi says. If that didn’t get resolved, he was sure Michigan was going to stink on offense, and if that was indeed the case, the Wolverines were in deep trouble. It was time to intervene.
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“Do you mind if I open the meeting?” Poggi asked Gattis, who agreed.
“Here’s what I see,” Poggi said. “There’s support here, but it’s divided between Josh and what he wants to do, and some other legacy ideas.” To Poggi, Gattis knew the system that he’d learned under Joe Moorhead well, but several other assistants weren’t on board. They wanted more of what Harbaugh had done in his Stanford days — quarterback under center, using a fullback, things they knew the head coach liked.
“We have a 60-40 room here. And we’re gonna fail as an organization because of this,” Poggi said. “I think Josh is really smart. His offense he knows very well. He’s been hired as a coordinator whether anybody in this room likes it, or doesn’t like it.
“Jim’s hired him to be the coordinator, and because of that he’s got to have confidence, and right now I see a coach that doesn’t have confidence. I see a coach that is looking over his shoulder. I see a coach that is answering questions in a non-confident way because he doesn’t know if the question is a ‘gotcha’ question or an ‘I’m-on-the-team’ question. It’s obviously driving the guy crazy. Josh, is this correct?”
“Yes,” Gattis said. The first-time offensive coordinator acknowledged that he sometimes felt like he didn’t have the group’s support or confidence, which had made things difficult. As Gattis allowed himself to open up, Poggi saw that it created an even more interesting dynamic.
“In football buildings, like in the corporate world, you do not want to open yourself up because you’re afraid you’ll get steamrolled,” says Poggi, who has been successful in both. “And that very statement is why so many football operations organizations cannot sustain success, because people are not willing to be honest and transparent with each other.”
Poggi had an idea. “Why don’t we all go around the table and say something personally? Not football-related, but about ourselves, in confidence, that very few people know,” he said. “I’ll start.”
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Poggi told the dozen or so men in the room that he wanted them to know that he loves his wife and five children more than he loves himself, but admitted that he was now doubting whether he was a good husband and a good father. He couldn’t, he confessed, remember a lot of his children’s childhood.
The coaches around the table were quiet, perhaps a bit stunned that this coach in his early 60s revealed something so intimate. Then new offensive line coach Sherrone Moore shared, and before he was finished, he was weeping. And so it went with every coach in the room. “That was huge for us as people,” says Moore, who is now a co-offensive coordinator. “It pushed us in another direction. When you do that, you think about things differently.”
Poggi said from that point on, the staff collaborated. “When we finished, I knew we were going to be really good because we were going to stop lying to each other about what our real motives were.”
Gattis describes that meeting as coming “at a critical point” because it brought the new staff together amid the stress of outside noise about Harbaugh’s job security. “We felt like we were coaching for our jobs every game.
“He rallied the troops together and that’s really what he does best,” he said. “And when he would notice that maybe tensions are flaring or stress was flaring, he’d rally us back together and say, ‘Look, man, if there’s something going on, talk in here.’ He became a huge buffer for Jim.”
Poggi’s role wasn’t just managing the assistants, but Harbaugh, too.
“Jim obviously respects him a lot. They’re like brothers,” Macdonald says. “They’ll argue a lot, but it’s a good healthy relationship. He’s willing to disagree with Jim and vice versa, and he’s great with the players. They just work really well together.”
When many veteran head coaches feel pressured about hanging onto their jobs, their instinct is to become more involved in every phase of the program. Poggi, though, didn’t see that as the best solution for his boss.
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“Look, Jim,” Poggi told him. “Stay out of the offensive and defensive rooms. Don’t get involved with your coordinators. Let me sit in there and be involved with them and I can give you the information that you need.” Poggi, a former offensive lineman at Pitt, sat in all of Michigan’s offensive meetings. On Sundays, he would sit with Macdonald’s defensive staff, watch game film and gather game notes.
Poggi convinced Harbaugh to back off in the same manner he’d often begin their conversations: “I’m gonna say something to you that you might bristle against, but know I’m saying it to you because I love you and care about you.” In regards to Gattis, Poggi told Harbaugh, “You hired this guy to be your coordinator. Stay out of that room or you need to make a change and go in and do it yourself.”
Harbaugh trusted Poggi, let his assistants coach, and Michigan won a Big Ten title and earned a Playoff spot. And Gattis won the Broyles Award as the nation’s top assistant coach.
Harbaugh’s father, Jack, a college head coach for 19 years, said coaches need a relationship on their staff like Jim has with Poggi. “You need a guy that wants nothing in return and isn’t looking for a promotion or a pat on the back, and they have enough courage that when they see things that you might be able to tweak a little bit, or should be tweaked a little bit that they’re not afraid to say it,” he said. “They have that kind of relationship. Jim’s drawn tremendously from Biff.”
“Biff’s a great mentor and has been that for me,” Harbaugh told The Athletic. “He likes to scheme it up, and he knows how to coach and helps coach the coaches. … As far as helping me personally, there’s not too many decisions that I make that I don’t run by Biff and we talk it out.”
Before Poggi influenced the Wolverines, before he spent three decades as one of the most successful high school coaches in the country, and before he met Jim Harbaugh, the Baltimore native was a college teammate of Dan Marino’s at Pitt with aspirations to teach.
He ultimately graduated from Duke and took a coaching job at Baltimore’s McDonogh School, where he taught American Government and U.S. History classes and earned $8,000 a year. One day, his soon-to-be father-in-law asked him if he wanted to learn business, and Poggi proved to be a quick study. In the wake of the 1987 stock market crash, his hedge fund flourished and he made more money than he’d ever dreamed. Poggi still kept his coaching career afloat, accepting jobs at Brown, Temple and The Citadel, but those stints lasted about a year before he returned home to help care for his mother.
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In 1988, he became a volunteer assistant coach at the Gilman School, his alma mater. A year later he became a full-time assistant, but never took a salary — not even when he became Gilman’s head coach in 1996 and led the Greyhounds on a run of 13 state titles over the next 19 seasons. While running the Gilman program, Poggi personally funded another local start-up high school football program at St. Frances Academy. Poggi grew up in Baltimore’s Little Italy, just a stone’s throw from St. Frances, and was on the board of the 200-year-old predominantly Black private school in one of the roughest areas of the country.
Though Harbaugh had recruited Poggi’s players at Gilman, they’d never met in person until the 2015 Citrus Bowl in Florida, in Harbaugh’s first season at Michigan. Poggi mentioned he’d been courted to join the staff of another college program. Harbaugh slipped into recruiter mode: “Why don’t you come to Michigan?” Poggi’s son Henry was a fullback on the team. Getting to spend more time with Henry was part of the reason Poggi accepted the job.
But after one season on Harbaugh’s staff, Poggi was called back to St. Frances as head coach.
He invested millions in the school, which was on the verge of closing, and turned it into a premier destination for high school football recruits. In addition to building a training room, locker room and equipment room, that money hired academic staff, built classrooms, upgraded the kitchen and hired a cook to feed the students breakfast and lunch, and for the football team that stayed later, dinner. Poggi rented five homes to house some of the students, who then lived with the coaches. He also funded 65 scholarships.
“We hired and staffed and visioned and cultured,” he said.
Students flocked to St. Frances to join Poggi. One was Blake Corum, a running back from Virginia, now a Heisman Trophy candidate for the Wolverines.
“It is a program that can change your life,” Corum said. “It is a program with a bunch of kids that don’t come from much who are trying to find a way out, and have the support system within that school to help them make it out.
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“Everyone on the football team goes to college, so when I say St. Frances Academy is a school that will change your life, it really does.”
Michigan senior edge rusher Eyabi Okie, known then as Eyabi Anoma, was an eighth-grader when he met Poggi. “He was this guy with a big T-shirt on with no sleeves – ‘What are you wearing, dude?’” Okie recalled.
When Okie was a sophomore at St. Frances, Poggi’s son Sam was his position coach. The younger Poggi made a hefty claim: “Dad, this kid is the best kid we’ve ever had.” In Okie’s first game that season, he was flagged for a personal foul and yelled something back at the referee. The elder Poggi took Okie out of the game and got right in his face. “It wasn’t about the play. It was about your behavior after,” Poggi told him. “Go over there and sit down.”
As Okie walked past Poggi, the coach heard the teenager say, “Man, I can’t play for this guy!”
Poggi walked back to Okie. “What did you just say?”
“I can’t play for you.”
Poggi’s voice softened. “You have no idea how much I’m gonna love you as a human being, so if you can’t play for me, you can’t play for anybody.”
They had zero problems from then on. “We connected on a stronger level after that,” said Okie, who reunited with Poggi at Michigan after stops at Alabama, Houston and Tennessee-Martin. “It was like, ‘Whatever you say, coach, I’m all in.’
“He doesn’t tell you what you want to hear. But he tells you what you need to hear, and we need a lot more coaches like that now in society. I can’t put into words how much he impacted me. If I didn’t have him in my life I don’t know where I’d be.”
And it was a lesson from his time at St. Frances that Poggi took to Harbaugh in 2020. Poggi saw as a rival Florida’s IMG Academy, another powerhouse stocked with four- and five-star talent. Poggi drew on something his son Henry had once said during his time at Michigan: Ohio State probably thinks about beating Michigan every single day, and he wasn’t sure the Wolverines thought about the Buckeyes until it was Ohio State week.
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After Poggi’s St. Frances team went 2-0 against IMG, he told Harbaugh about something he felt had made a difference. “We do something called the ‘East Baltimore Drill’ every day,” Poggi said. In football terms, it was really “Inside Drill,” or Football 101, football in the trenches. Pads popping. No passes. Just a smash-mouth running game. No blitzing. No slanting.
“We do it every day because we know IMG isn’t doing it every day,” Poggi told him. “We know they’re running skelly and parading around their billion-dollar facility.”
When Poggi returned to Ann Arbor last year, he was delighted to learn that Michigan had created the “Beat Ohio Period.” They do it every Tuesday, and there is no more important practice period at Michigan.
“It’s the only time at practice we ever had music and the music amplified things,” Gattis said. “You know immediately when that whistle blew and the music started blaring, it was on. It was the most physical part of any practice that I’ve ever seen. It was, by far, the best thing we did.”
A few days before Michigan won the Big Ten title game, Poggi got serious consideration from UConn to be its head coach. Jim Mora got the job. Poggi would be lying if he said he wouldn’t love a crack at being a college head coach; he loves projects, and there are certainly some programs that need fixing. One of his proteges, Macdonald, said Poggi’s age and experience might elicit skepticism, but “for some creative athletic director who is willing to think outside the box, it’d be a hell of an investment.”
It doesn’t hurt that Poggi has some of the biggest names in football in his corner.
“I believe Biff Poggi would be an absolute great choice to run a Division I program,” Nick Saban told The Athletic. “Managing a football program is similar to overseeing a successful business – vision, culture, hiring, management and understanding people are key. Biff has been there and has done just that.”
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Harbaugh said Poggi would be a great head coach if he gets the chance. “No doubt in my mind,” he said. “He’s got it all. I’d work for Biff.
“His relationship to everybody else is never king-to-subject. It’s friend-to-friend. It’s collaborative. … It’s always about the team.”
JJ McCarthy, the former five-star QB recruit who has had a breakout season this year after taking over the starting job, describes his relationship with Poggi as one of the most important that he has in this facility. “He’s a guy that cared about how I was feeling emotionally, spiritually, mentally — not just a byproduct of what I do on the field,” McCarthy said. “Last year, when I was going through the tough time of not playing and not getting the reps that I felt like I deserved, he was there to keep encouraging me, always lifting my head up. ‘Keep pushing. You’re right there. We all see it.'”
Last August, Harbaugh and Poggi were discussing how well the team had responded to such a physical and intense training camp. “Man, I really love what they’re doing,” Harbaugh said.
“So, you’re really proud of them?” Poggi asked.
“Yeah, I’m really proud of ’em,” Harbaugh said. “I really like coaching this team.”
“So, you really love these kids?”
“Yeah.”
“Tell them that today,” said Poggi.
Harbaugh did.
And this season, Michigan is proving that its 2021 breakthrough was no fluke. Only one team, Maryland, has stayed within a score of the Wolverines. They blew out No. 10 Penn State by 24, rushing for 418 yards on the Nittany Lions. They whipped rival Michigan State, 29-7.
“The culture is super strong here,” Corum said. “We don’t care what others say. We know the work that we put in and we believe in each other. We know what we’re capable of.”
The Wolverines know they’ll probably be an underdog at Ohio State later this year, but they don’t seem fazed by it.
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“We strived to say, ‘There’s not many teams that can out-personnel Ohio State,'” said a member of the 2021 Michigan staff who was granted anonymity to speak freely about the program’s trajectory. “We were gonna beat them by out-culturing them.”
McCarthy concurs, saying, “For so many years it’s just been always getting their butts kicked (against the Buckeyes), and when you finally take it to them, you have that realization of, ‘Wow, we can really do this.’ We have a great squad. What happened last year is going to be happening for years on.”
(Illustration: Sean Reilly / The Athletic; photos: Simon Bruty, David E. Klutho / Getty Images)
