Another FCS school has chosen to go to the Division III ranks for its next head coach. First, it was Northwestern State hiring Belhaven’s Blaine McCorkle and this time it’s Columbia who has hired Jon Poppe from Union College.
Poppe spent only one season as head coach for Union College in Schenectady, New York where the team went 10-2 overall and received an at-large bid to the 2023 NCAA Division III Playoffs. They won their first-round game on the road against Delaware Valley before falling in the second round to Johns Hopkins.
Poppe is familiar with the Ivy League and Columbia. He spent time at Harvard from 2011 through 2014 as a secondary and special teams coach followed by a move to Columbia as the secondary coach and recruiting coordinator. After spending the 2015 through 2017 seasons with Columbia, he returned to Harvard for the 2017 through 2022 seasons.
Poppe will take over a Columbia team that went 3-7 in 2023 under interim head coach Mark Fabish. Fabish stepped into the head coaching role following the retirement of Al Bagnoli in August but the school did not retain Fabish as head coach. Poppe will attempt to bring Columbia into the upper half of the Ivy League consistently as the Lions have historically been the worst team in the conference with only one conference championship in 1961 (shared with Harvard).
Photo Credit to Union College Athletics
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