Inside the Baltimore superpower fueling Michigan football's 2020 recruiting class

Rainer Sabin | Detroit Free Press

Show Caption Hide Caption Michigan's Jim Harbaugh explains what went wrong vs. Ohio State Jim Harbaugh explains what went wrong in another meltdown vs. Ohio State, a 56-27 loss at Michigan Stadium, Nov. 30, 2019.

BALTIMORE — Go to Dunbar High Field, he says.

Practice is at 11 a.m.

Upon arriving a few minutes early, there is not a soul to be found except a shirtless man strutting along the sidewalk across the street. The gates at the complex are locked.

The phone vibrates.

Come to the school. We had a problem.

Less than a mile away, past a few boarded-up row houses covered in graffiti, and just a block away from the Baltimore City Detention Center, where a barbed-wire fence lines the perimeter, sits a peaceful courtyard of St. Frances Academy, a Georgian-style building. It’s quiet as a church. Buzz the front door.

[ Michigan football's 2020 recruiting class: Here are the commits ]

Take a trip down a rickety elevator to the basement. Step into a hub of activity, where teenagers mill about excitedly in a hallway. Nearby is a room with a large conference table and whiteboards, where older men in workout gear gather.

Enter and meet Biff Poggi, the man who, in three years, improbably cobbled together one of the nation’s best high school football teams at the oldest continuously operating African American Catholic school in the United States.

The 59-year-old Poggi bears a resemblance to the actor John Goodman and sounds like him, too. He sports a crew cut and has the build of a lineman because he was one at Pitt during the days when Dan Marino commanded the offense.

Earlier this year, Poggi became an Internet sensation because he wore a tattered shirt with no sleeves during a nationally televised game against Miami Central. Based on appearance alone, no one would think this is a rich man, let alone a wildly successful coach. But he is both. He leads the Panthers to victories on the field and helps finance the operation off it, investing approximately $2.5 million into the school and football program.

Wife: “Honey do you need me to help you pick an outfit for your national televised game?”



Coach: “No need sweetheart, I’ve got just the thing” pic.twitter.com/N2qMNRUu75 — Transfer Portal (@NCAAPortal) August 24, 2019

After saying hello on this November day, he explains why there was no practice at Dunbar. The team St. Frances was supposed to play the next day, Clarkson Football North out of Ontario, had forfeited. According to Poggi, Clarkson’s players held a vote and decided they didn’t want to play because St. Frances was too good. Only two weeks before, Poggi’s Panthers roughed up the mercenary outfit, IMG Academy, 35-7. Before running into St. Frances, IMG won 53 of its previous 54 games and defeated Clarkson, 50-0, in October.

“We are not crying in our milk,” Poggi tells his team a few minutes later during a meeting. “We can control what we can control.”

His audience includes some of the top prospects in the country. On St. Frances’ roster are players who have committed to LSU, Alabama, Oregon and Michigan. In fact, four members of the Panthers are in the Wolverines' 2020 class: dynamic running back Blake Corum, four-star linebacker Osman Savage, offensive lineman Micah Mazzccua and defender Nikhai Hill-Green.

The pipeline from St. Frances to Schembechler Hall was built after Poggi spent 2016 in Ann Arbor as Jim Harbaugh’s right-hand man. As a special advisor and associate head coach, Poggi worked out of Harbaugh's office and lived in a hotel near Michigan's campus. The two football Alphas united in Orlando at the Citrus Bowl the previous year. Poggi’s son, Henry, was a fullback for the Wolverines at the time and Harbaugh presented Poggi with an offer to come work for him. Poggi had just finished a 19-year run as coach at his alma mater, the prestigious Gilman School in Baltimore, where his team had won 13 conference championships. With Poggi contemplating his next career move, the University of Maryland also expressed interest in bringing him aboard.

But the opportunity with Michigan seemed the perfect fit.

“I was really excited about it,” he says. “I loved it initially. Loved it.”

Poggi even thought about buying a plot of land on the same street where Harbaugh and the Michigan coach’s parents lived. The price tag wasn’t the issue. He had made a fortune operating a hedge fund and still is involved with the investment firm he chairs, Samuel James Ltd. But Poggi, a father of five, didn’t want to uproot his family from the Baltimore area. He had an attachment to the place. It was where he was raised, in the Italian section, not far from a school that back then he had no idea existed … St. Frances.

****

Poggi, whose first name is really Francis, was raised by a pharmacist and a housewife in what he says was a lower middle-class family. As a student, he didn’t have much interest in academics. But he loved football. It got him into college at Pittsburgh. And once there, it opened the door for him to graduate from Duke. Poggi thought he’d make a career out of the game that was his passion. At a Baltimore prep school, McDonogh, Poggi coached while teaching Russian and European history — two subjects that bored him.

“I was probably half a page in front of the kids,” he says. “If you showed up, you got a B.”

Eventually, football became his sole focus as Poggi bounced around from one college staff to another — supervising either the offensive or defensive line at Brown, Temple and the Citadel. In many ways, these were dream jobs. But he wasn’t making much money. So, his father-in-law, Joe Mix, taught Poggi how to play the stock market.

He soon became a financial wizard, managing other people’s money with great success.

It led him to hob-nob with Baltimore’s elite.

Poggi was invited to swanky functions and the conversation would inevitably shift to the plight of the city. Why is Baltimore so horrendous? Why is it so violent? Why are the jails filled with young minorities? In each of the last five years, Baltimore has endured at least 300 homicides and municipal government has long been infested with corruption.

As Poggi listened to others complain, he bristled.

“If you are so worried about it, if you are so concerned about it that this is what you want to talk about, then go do something about it,” he thought to himself.

“Well, I decided to do something about it,” he says.

So, Poggi sunk his money into St. Frances, a coed school founded in 1828 to educate young women of color.

With a $60,000 donation made when he was still at Gilman, Poggi helped launch the football program there in 2008.

Eight years later, after he and Gilman parted ways over differences in philosophy, St. Frances became a landing spot for Poggi’s army of assistants. Among them was one of Poggi’s former players at Gilman, Henry Russell. Poggi presented the idea of Russell becoming the caretaker of St. Frances football while he went to Michigan to work alongside Harbaugh. It seemed crazy, Russell thought.

“That’s a pretty funny joke,” he said to Poggi. “There’s no way. Why would I do that?”

The Panthers weren’t any good, after all. They went 2-10 in 2015 and had a losing record the previous season. But Poggi was on a mission; he wanted to make St. Frances into a place where budding athletes from rough backgrounds could use their talents to go to college, receive a top education and better their lives. Football was a transformative experience for him. It could be the same for others.

“All I want for these kids is a chance,” Poggi says. “And then what they do with it is on them. … You can give them a shot. That’s all anybody gets is a shot.”

Russell knew Poggi’s intentions were genuine. When he played at Gilman in the late-90s, Poggi was there to offer guidance, showing an interest in helping Russell’s teammates when they were burdened by trouble. He also credits Poggi with his admission to the Naval Academy. When Russell was sent off to Iraq during the conflict there, he’d call Poggi from a satellite phone in a remote outpost, just to check in and see how he was doing. About a decade ago, one of those long-distance conversations shifted to Russell’s future and whether he wanted to continue in the service.

Poggi then asked him if he wanted to coach with him.

It didn’t take much convincing. Poggi was like a second dad to him. So, he said yes.

****

In a dark room, Russell supervises a film session. With the game against Clarkson canceled, the Panthers get a head start on preparing for Life Christian Academy, a private school in Chester, Virginia, they would eventually beat, 35-0.

Russell, as co-head coach, presides over a fearsome defense that shut out six opponents in 2019. The unit is loaded with players headed to the top teams in college football.

“Sometimes you forget who they are, how talented they are, how highly recruited they are because as a coach they’re kids,” he says.

It wasn’t always this way. Russell recalls when he arrived in 2016, there were 15 students at the first team meeting. St. Frances was struggling and needed a bigger enrollment. Football was seen as a pathway toward achieving that goal. The closure of Eastern Christian Academy, another Maryland school deeply tied to the sport, helped boost the numbers. So did one of Harbaugh’s famous satellite camps, which attracted attention to St. Frances and more players. To further stockpile the roster, St. Frances actively recruited, bringing in athletes from other areas of Maryland and out of state as well.

The results followed. Russell guided the Panthers to a 10-2 record in his inaugural season. The following year, St. Frances won all 13 of its games. Then, the Panthers went 10-0 in 2018. That same year, former St. Frances defensive end Eyabi Anoma, who was strongly considering the Wolverines, enrolled at Alabama. Ranked the No. 4 prospect in the nation during his senior year, he was the school’s first prized recruit and helped further raise the profile of St. Frances.

Nick Saban made the little school in Baltimore a priority, securing two more Panthers players for 2019. Other college programs began to send staffers to Baltimore. LSU and Michigan have pushed down the doors since. Meanwhile, Russell’s inbox began to fill up. Emails and Twitter direct messages from teenagers, with attached links of Hudl videos showing their highlights, pinged his phone. They wanted to come to St. Frances.

“It’s absolutely crazy to me where sports in high school have gone,” Russell says. “Families will do whatever to try to get their kid in the best opportunity to get to the next level.”

According to the Archdiocese of Baltimore, Poggi funded scholarships for more than 40 players last year. Annual tuition at the school, which reported an enrollment of 161 at the start of the 2018 academic year, is $9,850 and 65% of the student body receives some measure of financial aid. Poggi also supplements the salaries of eight teachers and provides money for tutors that guide SAT prep. Town homes are rented out and Russell estimates that about 40 kids stay there, where four assistant coaches live as well.

Corum was among those who came to St. Frances for the better competition. Originally from Warrenton, Virginia, the running back joined the Panthers after attending St. Vincent Pallotti in nearby Laurel. Upon arriving at St. Frances in 2018, he was surrounded by teammates with similar athletic gifts.

“When I came here, I met some challenges. But I felt I was prepared and ready for anything,” he says. “Iron sharpens iron.”

The daily grind, Corum says, is intense.

It’s part of the gritty St. Frances experience, where — outside of gamedays — nothing is easy. The Panthers don’t have a designated field and practice at several different locations, including Dunbar, a couple of YMCAs and Patterson Park, a public green space where they play some of their games.

Brian Dohn, a national recruiting analyst with 247Sports, was gobsmacked when he visited the football powerhouse to watch their players go through drills.

“You think it’s going to be in some pristine place,” he said. “It’s in a park, a public park. And St. Frances had 70% of the field and the other 30% was a lacrosse clinic for the local youth in the area. You got guys who are going to Bama, LSU and Michigan running around on half of the field and 11- and 12-year old kids on the other side trying to learn lacrosse. It’s what keeps a lot of those kids humble and hungry.”

****

Poggi won’t argue that St. Frances leads a hard-knock life. Players have come to him despondent after losing family members to gun violence. Over the shrills of whistles and pads thumping at practice, Poggi claims to have heard shots fired and recalls on one memorable day witnessing a man killed in broad daylight. The grim reality of life outside the walls of St. Frances is inescapable.

Even in the school’s basement, which houses the football program’s base of operations, it’s bleak. Poggi likened it to a dungeon before he had locker and training rooms built.

Off the main corridor, where players roam, Poggi frets about the 2020 schedule as an Ohio State assistant coach, in town on a recruiting visit, listens. Poggi explains his predicament, outlining the obstacles he faces finding teams willing to go up against St. Frances. The Buckeyes’ staffer pipes up with some suggestions and the two spitball ideas.

This year, St. Frances had games in California, New Jersey, Florida (twice) and Virginia. As they criss-crossed the country and rolled to an 11-1 record and the No. 5 ranking in the USA TODAY Super 25, the travel expenditures soared to nearly $300,000. It’s the cost of being too good in the eyes of the teams it used to compete against in the Maryland Interscholastic Athletic Association. After St. Frances matured into a national power, other members of the MIAA A conference refused to play the Panthers, citing safety concerns. Poggi insinuates the reasons were more insidious, extending to race and class.

The boycott of St. Frances caused a stir last year in and around Baltimore, where Poggi became the central figure in the controversy surrounding his team’s place in the area’s high school sports landscape. Some see the coach as an unscrupulous man who stacks the deck with the best players to create an unfair advantage and pad his career record. Others view him as a martyr who spends his money to give disadvantaged youth an opportunity they otherwise would never have.

“It’s true I am a very polarizing figure,” he says. “People think I am a rich guy and all I care about is football and winning, that I am just down here using black kids to win. That’s the side they see and they want to see that side. And I answer it this way: Come visit. Come spend time with us. Come down. Nobody comes down. They’re scared. ... If you can leave after a day and you still think I’m that way, then you can have your opinion.”

But whatever conclusion those outsiders make, Poggi would disregard it anyway. He isn’t consumed with what his detractors think. Reminded he has F.U. money, he smiles and nods. He then continues to express confidence in his mission by making a tangible impact on others.

That morning, he reconnected with Shane Lee, the former Gilman and St. Frances linebacker who now starts for the Crimson Tide. During Alabama’s second bye week, Lee flew home and made a beeline from the airport to St. Frances, sitting in on the film session that Russell conducted.

"Take advantage of your opportunities," he tells his former teammates.

Afterwards, he stops by to chat with Poggi, who was thrilled to see him and even happier knowing he wouldn’t be sticking around for long. Lee had found his way to a better place, like so many others at St. Frances have in recent years.

“That’s the key thing,” Poggi says. “They’re going to college. They’re getting out of here. They’re not going to wind up at that street corner. They are not going to do that.

"Because they have a chance.”

Contact Rainer Sabin at rsabin@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @RainerSabin. Read more on the Michigan Wolverines, Michigan State Spartans and sign up for our Big Ten newsletter.