Biff Poggi is back on the Michigan football coaching staff this year after a brief stint as the head coach at Charlotte. Because of a current suspension that Sherrone Moore is serving, Poggi is the acting head coach. This isn’t Poggi’s first time on the staff, as he also coached for Michigan during the Jim Harbaugh era.
Before Biff Poggi originally came to Michigan in 2016, he was a high school coach in Maryland. The Wolverines liked to recruit his players, and that led to a phone call from Jim Harbaugh.
“This is a hilarious story actually,” Poggi said in a video posted by Fox College Football. “In my house, we had a kind of a little church group Bible study on Wednesday night, and I leave my phone with my daughter, and I said, you know, only interrupt me if it's one of the children's, you know, there's blood involved. And she comes down and she says, ‘There's a guy named Jim Harbaugh on the phone.’”
Poggi thought that it was a joke, but he had to take that phone call. Harbaugh was calling to offer him a job on the Michigan coaching staff.
“We just start talking about Michigan football,” Poggi continued. “He said, you know, ‘What do you think our record would have been last year had we punted the ball more?’ I was like, ‘Jim, I don't know.’ And we just started talking ball. And he said, ‘Why don't you come out and join the staff?’ And I said, ‘Well, you know, I'm running this high school program in Baltimore.’ And he said, ‘Yeah, Yeah, but why don't you come up and join the staff?’”
Eventually, Poggi went down to Florida and met Harbaugh at his hotel before the Wolverines played Florida in their bowl game. The two of them got along well.
“I met him at the bowl game,” Poggi said. “That was the Citrus Bowl that year, right, where we beat the brakes off of Florida. We met in in his hotel room, and we were demonstrating offensive line blocking techniques on a dresser that was in his hotel room, and then it was kind of love ever after that.”
Biff Poggi was an analyst during the 2016 season, but then he went back to coaching high school football. Then, he returned to the Michigan football coaching staff in 2021 as the associate head coach. He is now back with the Wolverines in that same role.
