No sleeves, no service: Poggi’s unusual coaching style hasn’t translated yet for 49ers

You might say Charlotte 49ers head coach Biff Poggi wears his heart on his sleeve, except for the fact that there are no sleeves on the cut-off T-shirt he likes to wear on gamedays.

Poggi’s casual outfits and his brutal honesty are part of what people with the 49ers like to call “Biff being Biff.” You’ve never heard or seen a college football head coach quite like him. He wears what he wants and he says what he wants, and he also happens to be independently wealthy due to his financial wizardry. Part of the charm of the 63-year-old Poggi, who’s in his first season as the 49ers head coach, is that he’s so unusual.

But the results have been usual for Charlotte in Poggi’s rookie season as a head college football coach. After going 3-9 in 2022, the 49ers are 3-8 in 2023, with one game left at South Florida.

The 49ers played and lost their final home game of the season Saturday against Rice, an average team that improved to 5-6 with a surprisingly easy 28-7 win.

On a gorgeous November afternoon, there were officially 9,385 fans in Charlotte’s 15,314-seat stadium, which remains the smallest at the FBS level. The place was no more than 20% full by the end of the game when Luke McCaffrey, Christian’s younger brother, scored a touchdown for Rice.

Charlotte was horrible offensively, managing only 158 yards — the worst yardage total in Charlotte’s football history, which only dates back to 2013.

Afterward, Poggi (pronounced POE-jee) said exactly what he thought about it all in his press conference, which included these quotes:

▪ “I think we got worse. We took a step back.”

▪ “We just aren’t mentally that tough.”

▪ “When we were down by 13, it was like a morgue on our sideline.”

▪ “We still have an incredible amount of work to do.”

▪ “Our quarterback position is our quarterback position. You know, we desperately need an upgrade in that position. And that’s just the truth.”

▪ “I told (the 49ers players) I was very disappointed in their performance. ... I told them that there will be a number of them that won’t be back next year, whether it’s graduation or my decision to move on. But I also told them that doesn’t mean I don’t love you and care about you, because I do. But I’ve been hired to do a job, and I’m going to do that job. And that goes to everyone in the building by the way, including me.”

‘I’ve really liked our competitiveness’

This wasn’t an outlandish news conference by any means. This is the way Poggi talks. It’s not unlike the way Deion Sanders talks at Colorado or Steve Spurrier talked at Florida and South Carolina, with the primary difference being that Sanders was a Pro Football Hall of Famer as a player and Spurrier won a national championship as a coach.

Poggi has the same streak of candor, but not the same cachet. What he does have the support of Charlotte athletic director Mike Hill, who made this out-of-the-box hire and gave Poggi a five-year contract not long after he fired Will Healy in October 2022 following a 1-7 start. Hill is firmly sticking with Poggi.

“Today notwithstanding, I’ve really liked our competitiveness,” Hill said after Saturday’s home finale. “We were getting embarrassed a lot last year. We couldn’t stop anybody. It was hard to watch. And now while the record is really not any better than it was a year ago at this point, we have competed in a lot of games. Think about the Florida game (Charlotte lost, 22-7). Think about the Maryland game (Charlotte lost, 38-20). We’re definitely better. But it’s nowhere close to where we want to be. We still have a long way to go, I think, in the personnel department.”

This is true. Poggi’s team has improved defensively from a year ago. But offensively, the team is often, to use Poggi’s word, “inept.” Watching the 49ers offense is like watching the Carolina Panthers’ offense on most Sundays. Charlotte doesn’t have an FBS-level quarterback — the 49ers played three of them Saturday — and its wide receivers also looked “dismal” (another Poggi word) Saturday.

As for Poggi’s brutal honesty, Hill said he found it refreshing that Poggi doesn’t sugar-coat things, but also allowed that “his style is not for everybody.”

Poggi’s recruiting mistake

Healy’s teams could score but they’d give up 40 points a game with numbing regularity. Poggi tried to upgrade Healy’s roster as fast as he could. It was there, he admitted, that he and his staff made some recruiting errors.

Said Poggi on Saturday: “I think my mistake was in recruiting early when I got here in January was looking at the roster and saying, ‘We need to get as many good players as we can.’ (But) I think that if they don’t have the right stuff in them, then you’re making a mistake. ... It’s probably better to get a guy maybe not as talented, but who will play hard, play selflessly, take hard coaching and will be all in for the team.”

Now, with a full year to recruit another class and work on the transfer portal again, Poggi said he and his staff are valuing character a little more and talent a little less, with the idea of establishing a locker-room culture Charlotte doesn’t have yet to enhance the team’s toughness.

When I asked Poggi after the game how far away this first season is to what he envisioned, he said: “Compared to what I wanted? Oh, not even close to what I wanted. ... As disappointed as people might be in a week where we lose a game, which has now been eight weeks, right, no one is more disappointed and surprised than me. Because I believe in our kids. And there’s just something that we haven’t mastered yet in the program. And it’s a sense of toughness.”

Those cut-off T-shirts

OK, let’s talk about Poggi’s sleeveless T-shirts. This has become Poggi’s trademark, for better or for worse. The Charlotte students appear to admire the look. And Hill, the AD, has also heard from some fans who believe a coach dressed like he’s about to mow the lawn while coaching a televised football game is quite off-putting.

“He asked me this summer,” Hill said of Poggi and his gameday attire. “He goes: ‘I want to wear this on the sideline. Is that OK?’ And I’m like, ‘Biff, be you.’ There’s some people who can’t stand it, and I get it. I’ve heard from some fans. But we also have a bunch of students who freakin’ love it. We sold out twice in the bookstore already. You know Pat McAfee (the ESPN TV host who wears a black muscle shirt on most of his shows) and those guys, they eat it up. And you’ve got others who are like: ‘This is ridiculous and it’s embarrassing.’”

For Hill, though, the T-shirts are part and parcel of the man he hired, and he wants Poggi to do his thing. Poggi was Jim Harbaugh’s right-hand man at Michigan, which doesn’t sound quite as good as it did before Michigan’s recent sign-stealing scandal. Harbaugh is currently serving a three-game suspension, his second suspension of the 2023 season.

Poggi wrote on X (formerly Twitter) this past week: “I am extending an open invitation to Jim Harbaugh to join me on the sidelines for the next two Charlotte football games. It would be my honor to stand next to you again as we did for three years.”

But just like the Charlotte 49ers offense, Harbaugh didn’t show up Saturday.

Poggi sounded like he was taking the loss to Rice very hard afterward.

“We hired him to do a job,” Hill said, repeating one of Poggi’s comments from the news conference. “And we didn’t hire him to come win three football games in a season. He is bitterly disappointed because his expectations for this year were higher. His expectations were higher than mine coming in.”

No kidding. Almost exactly a year ago, this is part of what Poggi said in his introductory news conference: “Our goal is very simple. We want to win the AAC (the American Athletic Conference, which is Charlotte’s new league as of 2023). And we want to win it repeatedly. And we want to get to the College Football Playoff. That’s why I left Michigan, and that’s what I’m expecting to do here. And you should be asking, ‘What’s your timetable?’ My timetable is now.”

When I did a preseason interview with Poggi, he expanded on that idea, saying of the 2023 season: “What I think is realistic is to compete for the conference title.”

When I pushed back a little, Poggi said: “If we’re not in the hunt, 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.”

Charlotte is now 3-8 and 2-5 in the American Athletic conference standings, which puts the 49ers in the bottom half of the league.

Whether Hill made a huge mistake or not remains to be seen.

But there’s no doubt about this: By the standards he set himself, Poggi has failed as a coach in 2023.

The unconventional hire has, so far, turned in extremely conventional results.