There was a whole lot of hype surrounding five-star freshman quarterback Bryce Underwood before he ever stepped foot on Michigan’s campus, and when you combine his arm talent with his high football IQ and his physical attributes, you may as well call him a superhero.
Considering how Underwood played this past Saturday, you could refer to Ann Arbor as Gotham City.
“He might actually
be Batman,” Biff Poggi, in his first game as Michigan’s interim head coach, said of Underwood following a 63-3 beatdown of Central Michigan. “We need to do a DNA test on him.”
That was far from Poggi’s only memorable quote from Saturday.
“I have a Labrador Retriever that could coach that guy,” Poggi said. “He’s incredible.”
For the uninitiated, there’s a whole lot more to Michigan’s interim coach than funny quotes like these. Poggi has lived a life fit for a movie script.
Here’s a refresher on everything you need to know about Poggi, heading into a Big Ten showdown against Nebraska.
For the love of the game
One thing many people don’t know about Frances “Biff” Poggi is he doesn’t need to coach football. After receiving a $25,000 loan from his father-in-law, Poggi launched the hedge fund Samuel James Limited in 1986. By the time he turned over operations to a few of his former players 30 years later, it was worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
With how much success that fund had, Poggi could have sat on his laurels, but he loved the game of football too much to do that. He worked as an assistant coach at his alma mater, Gilman School in Maryland, and worked his way up to being the head coach for two decades (1996-2015), winning 13 state titles in 19 seasons.
All those wins still weren’t enough for Poggi, who went on to create his own school, St. Frances Academy. Poggi founded the private high school in his hometown of Baltimore, Maryland and led it to national prominence.
Serving on the board for the academy, Poggi invested a significant amount of his personal wealth into the school, funding 65 scholarships according to his profile on the University of Charlotte’s athletic page. Players at St. Frances have gone on to play at Alabama, LSU, Notre Dame, Michigan and several other powers in the sport.
Poggi and his St. Frances program were featured in a 2020 four-part HBO documentary, “The Cost of Winning,” which is well worth the time for any Michigan fan looking to dive deeper into the man’s life.
Poggi’s dominant time in Maryland drew the interest of Jim Harbaugh, who hired Poggi in 2021. Biff worked as an associate head coach for Michigan from 2021-22 and was considered a key architect for Michigan’s two teams that year, as Bruce Feldman laid out in an excellent feature for The Athletic a few years ago.
Poggi left Michigan to take the head coaching job at Charlotte. Under Poggi, the 49ers went 6-16 and he was fired in Nov. 2024. He re-joined Michigan’s coaching staff this past offseason.
Peak football guy with the right amount of heart, and a love for Sherrone Moore
Poggi’s aesthetic has been part of the reason why he’s the internet’s favorite head coach. In many photos of him coaching, you can find him wearing no sleeves; he’s too focused on winning football games to care about his wardrobe.
“Well, my friend Warde Manuel said, ‘Congratulations, but you’re wearing sleeves, no shorts and a cap,’ so that’s what went into it,” Poggi said when asked about his wardrobe decision following the CMU game.
Speaking on the shakeups on the offensive line, Poggi mentioned Sherrone Moore spent all his time in the individual portion of practice with that position group. Poggi hyped up his boss when talking about weirdness of not having him on the sideline, praising the coach for leading the unit to back-to-back Joe Moore awards and making dominant line play part of Michigan’s identity.
“He got over there and started looking at things, and that will continue when he gets back,” Poggi said. “What an odd today, today was actually heartbreaking for me. I have children that are Sherrone’s age and we were texting last night about how much he loves me and I love him.
“It was a really hard week in our building, a really hard and emotional week. And I think what people that care realize is that football is a game about relationships, and his players love him like you wouldn’t believe. What I would say today was you saw a love letter from 120 young men to their football coach today.”
Being an interim coach can sometimes feel like being a substitute teacher. Yes, you are the one in charge, but it’s not a guarantee people will respect your authority. It’s not a label many coaches love, but Poggi embraces it. The bond between him and Moore is clear, and while Poggi never wants to be the center of attention, he’s done more than enough with his life to warrant it.
“I love this guy, it’s hard, it really is hard,” Poggi said. “I love Michigan, too … Sherrone sent me this text at about 7 o’clock and he said, ‘You’re the one I want to do it, I know you’ll love our boys to the core.’ That was the text … this was all about Sherrone Moore, and it’s going to stay all about Sherrone Moore.”
While beating a MAC school was fun and all, Moore won’t be involved with the team at all this week, with his self-imposed suspension continuing until midnight on Sunday, Sept. 21. That means Poggi will be the lead man for Michigan’s Big Ten opener against Nebraska, but the larger-than-life coach appears to be up for the task.
“It’s going to be a lot different, right?” Poggi said. “I’m going to try to do everything as I think he would do it, because the players are used to that. I will say this to you, I’ve been around a lot of coaches, a lot of really good coaches, and Sherrone, he’s a superstar, a young superstar.”
