GREEN BAY, Wis. — Bare tree branches don’t quiet the wind, and the ice on the bay is thick enough that the neighbors set up a hockey rink offshore. Nothing unusual for late January on the northeast side of town. Meanwhile, at a blue waterfront five-bedroom that was an occasional launch point for fishing charters until last summer, there’s a full scoreboard stashed in a wide-open garage, nothing in the planters on the small porch, and a Sheepadoodle named Vince Lombardi barking behind the front door.
Doug Gottlieb opens it up and startles a bit; he apparently didn’t expect his expected visitor to be standing right there. But without ado, it’s down to the basement, where a first-time college basketball head coach wearing sweatpants and a hat on backward is about to host the final segment of his daily Fox Sports Radio show. Gottlieb delivers a booming intro from the “TireRack-dot-com Studios,” which in this case is a laptop on a bar, then cartwheels through the day’s big stories.
It’s an atmospheric entry. Plunging out of the cold, plasma trails everywhere.
“What if Jimmy Butler was listed as ‘out’ because of P-I-T-A?” Gottlieb muses, riffing on news about the then-disgruntled Miami Heat star. “Pain In The …”
He leaves the thought unfinished — a minor miracle. Last May, the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay hired a feisty talk radio guy with no Division I experience and let him bring all the takes with him, too. If nothing else, the most unusual employment experiment in college hoops has not gone unnoticed. Personnel decisions, offhand quips and social media beef have become frantic headlines. A 20-game losing streak by a Horizon League team is tinder for pundits instead of a footnote. Some dilemmas, like a star’s broken ankle or a restriction on practice hours, are out of Gottlieb’s control. No one cares. The wait is on for spectacular success or spectacular failure, depending almost entirely on how you feel about the guy in charge.
After signing off radio just before 4 p.m., Gottlieb pulls on a sweatshirt that reads HOPE THEY SERVE TACOS IN HELL and then weaves an SUV lathered in road salt back to the Kress Events Center offices. Within 20 minutes, he’s drawing up zone offense concepts. Then it’s on to a staff meeting to get injury updates, map out a practice plan and talk offseason roster management and recruiting. Gottlieb has two laptops open. He asks for his WiFi password. The conclave ends at 7:05 p.m., with one last reminder from the head coach: Next week, he has to go to the Super Bowl.
A few minutes later, a man with a foot in two worlds crosses a parking lot wearing a puffer coat and a Green Bay Packers toque, and it’s suggested this had to be a long day.
“Oh,” Doug Gottlieb says, “that was nothing.”
In 2012, a massive new clock began ticking on the facade of Lambeau Field. Before long, people noticed a quirk: It ran 15 minutes fast. A deliberate homage to Vince Lombardi — the legendary Packers coach, not the dog — who had his own definition of punctuality. If you are five minutes early, he once said, you are already 10 minutes late. These days, even the lobby clock in the city’s venerable Hotel Northland is set to “Lombardi Time,” which can be a bit disorienting.
Here, in a sense, you’re always behind.
Enter a manic 49-year-old California native and son of a former college coach, who twice led the NCAA in assists at Oklahoma State and logged parts of four years playing professionally at home and abroad … and then spent the last two decades cultivating an audience via ESPN, CBS and FOX television and radio stints. The caricature of Doug Gottlieb is the cheekily overconfident, know-it-all opinionator with no detectable filter. It got him sued for libel in 2022, a predicament resolved with a retraction and apology. But the caricature didn’t have an identifiable alter ego until last summer, and even that’s a work in progress.
Pull up Wikipedia, and there it is:
Douglas Mitchell Gottlieb (born January 15, 1976) is an American basketball analyst, sports radio host and college basketball coach.
The main thing is the third thing. It’s like the world refuses to know him for what he insists he is, at least not in order. “I mean, what is a coach?” Gottlieb says, feet up in his living room at sunset. “A coach is somebody who knows and loves the sport, has to communicate really well, has to relate to the players, has to love all those different aspects of it. Has to like team-building. Has to be comfortable leading, but also has to be comfortable being kind of questioned, and enjoy the thrilling pressure of both success and failure. And all of those things are me.”
Bob Gottlieb, who ran programs at Jacksonville and Milwaukee in the 1970s and once vied with Dick Vitale for the Detroit Mercy gig, had left college hoops behind by the time he sat with his preteen son to watch high school games and suss out the best fit at that level. From this perch, Doug Gottlieb tried to decipher offensive sets and strategies and what each team was trying to get out of them. When Gottlieb left Notre Dame after one season, having been caught stealing other students’ credit cards (“Shot myself in the foot,” he says), he enrolled at Golden West College in Huntington Beach, Calif., where he helped coach the basketball squad for which he played and moonlighted as an assistant for his old high school coach, Andy Ground.
Even as a college basketball analyst, Gottlieb prepared for games by dissecting film of both teams’ previous five outings and challenging himself to predict calls on-air. “He has always wanted to coach, and I knew that from a young age,” says Ground, who’s a confidant to this day. “As you get older, you find your niche, and his niche happened to be broadcasting. I personally think that’s the much better field. A lot less headaches.”
At any point, Gottlieb could have made a move, sat on someone’s bench for a couple seasons. (His brother Gregg, an assistant coach with San Diego State women’s basketball, started on the sidelines 30 years ago.) But with three young children — one of whom is an equestrian athlete, and care for two horses tends to tax a budget — the math never added up to ditch lucrative television and radio gigs for an assistant coach’s salary. Nor did he see the logic in dues-paying, at least in his situation. Gottlieb left an interview for the Rice job in 2008 with the advice to get some experience as an assistant and then waded through a jam-packed lobby at the Final Four coaches’ hotel. School-branded polos and ladder-climbers everywhere. He could be one of those guys. Or he could keep using the bullhorn. “It’ll be harder, but it’ll be easier,” Gottlieb remembers thinking, “because I’m a different candidate.”
He came close to getting a job almost a dozen times, he says. Matter of fact, Gottlieb was the runner-up to Sundance Wicks for the Green Bay gig in the spring of 2023. He’d been bolstered by recommendations from what athletic director Josh Moon calls “pretty high-profile coaches.” He even had a staff in place and transfer portal targets he planned to pursue. Importantly, Gottlieb didn’t take the rejection personally, staying in touch with Green Bay administrators after the process.
When Wicks left to become Wyoming’s head coach last May, the timing was challenging. Who in the world is ready and willing to take a Horizon League job, when everyone else has a two-month head start?
Well, Green Bay already knew a guy. “That’s the type of coaches that are going to win at this level,” Moon says. “People that are not afraid to run into the fire.”
The news sparked a bit of that, yes. Marcus Hall, heading into his sophomore season with the Phoenix, scrolled through social media to read about his next coach. “I don’t know why people hate this guy,” Hall told his parents after logging off. Locally, it helped that Gottlieb walked in predisposed to assume the best in everyone, at least until proven otherwise. “I call it ‘Ready, shoot, aim,’ ” he says. Commingled with a thorough inability to be anything but himself, for better or worse, this flipped the skepticism about a California guy parachuting into the Fox River valley.
“In northeast Wisconsin, if anybody tells you they don’t have a preconceived opinion of people that are rooted on the coasts, they’re lying,” says Scott Perry, the owner of Melotte Distributing and a donor who’s attended Green Bay games since 1987. “I thought, ‘No matter what happens, this guy is never going to be humbled.’ He walked in a humbled man. He walked in knowing his biggest deficit is, he didn’t know what he didn’t know.”
Allowing Gottlieb to continue his radio show was a straightforward call, it seems. The income meant Gottlieb could sign on for a base salary of $215,000 from Green Bay – $40,000 less than women’s basketball coach Kayla Karius makes, which allows the department to redistribute the money elsewhere. The exposure to the program would be invaluable, immediately and in the longer term. (Gottlieb, for example, says he knows how to schedule in a way that best piques the interest of networks.) By holding practices in the morning hours — not an uncommon practice in college athletics — Gottlieb was free when his players were otherwise occupied. “I don’t need anything from him during those two hours,” Hall says. As for the perception that a coach fails unless he’s grinding on tape from dark to dark, Gottlieb counters with this: He’s divorced. He lives alone in a former Vrbo he bought fully furnished so he could move in the same day. His biggest chore is keeping a seven-month-old Sheepadoodle from eating chicken out of the garbage.
He has a lot of time to watch tape.
“This is my perception of it,” says junior guard Preston Ruedinger, a Green Bay native who played for two years at Valparaiso before transferring home. “Any college coach I’ve had goes home at 5 p.m., maybe. Sees the family, goes to have dinner. Doug just takes his break from 2 to 4. He’s texting us till 10 at night. He’s watching film whenever a regular coach would be off, from 5 to 8. He’s working. People don’t understand the actual time and effort he puts in.”
So that’s how and why a Division I men’s basketball coach also hosts a national sports talk radio show.
It is Gottlieb’s outlet. It refreshes him. It is as natural, he says, as brushing his teeth.
“Why keep doing it? Because I love doing it,” Gottlieb says. “I love the promotion of it, and I love that eventually we’ll win. … It’s just unfortunate the results aren’t there this year.”
Right. About that part.
Wisconsin-Green Bay has finished at .500 or better in 28 of its 44 seasons in Division I. (Brian Hamilton / The Athletic)
Inside a practice facility named after the winningest men’s hoops coach in school history, a Wednesday workout in late January begins with Alan Jackson tunes pumping out of a sideline speaker and Green Bay players pushing and shoving each other to jump into a drill. Battling, sort of, for more reps. Chaos in a good way. Something the Dick Bennett Gymnasium’s namesake could love.
Within a half hour, the ball rolls out of bounds after bouncing off an ankle. The scout team then scores roughly its millionth consecutive basket. The answer to that is a drive into traffic and another turnover. Normally, a staff aware of its team’s limitations bites tongues bloody. This … this is too much. The head coach blows his whistle, spins around and catches himself just before he punts the basketball in his hands.
“So f— bad!” Doug Gottlieb barks.
Such is the wild, whiplash dichotomy of the debut season of the Gottlieb Era in Green Bay. Smiles and laughs in the locker room during film sessions. Engagement during practice. And two wins, total, with a losing streak now 20 games long. A spot at No. 341 out of 364 Division I teams ranked on KenPom.com, after a Feb. 8 defeat at Purdue-Fort Wayne. “It’s weird, because the only time it feels like a (two-win) team is right after a loss, when everyone is pissed,” says Hall, the Phoenix’s active leading scorer at 12.5 points per game. “Because we really think we are going to win every game.”
Success is not an unreasonable ask here. Green Bay has finished at .500 or better in 28 of its 44 seasons in Division I. It reached three straight NCAA Tournaments in the mid-1990s, and there’s enough talent inside state lines alone to compete in the Horizon League. “The level of potential is gross at Green Bay,” says assistant coach Jordan McCabe, a native of nearby Kaukauna. But this season is undeniably grim. And right beside the win-loss column — subject to your opinion of the person running the operation — there’s a skyscraper of either explanations or excuses.
To begin with, Green Bay gets 16 allowable practice hours per week — four fewer than normal — thanks to Academic Progress Rate penalties stemming from two coaches ago. It’s a debilitating limitation at full strength, but full strength has been a fantasy anyway. The Horizon League freshman of the year in 2023-24, guard David Douglas Jr., didn’t meet with Gottlieb before transferring to Fresno State. Gottlieb’s first commitment opted to return to junior college. Three signees couldn’t start until September, because Green Bay’s rules required all international transfers to have in-person instruction for three-fourths of their classes, and there are zero in-person courses during Green Bay’s summer school.
Hall, one of four returners, contracted mononucleosis in the preseason. A key transfer, 7-foot-1 former four-star recruit Isaiah Miranda, withdrew from Green Bay by late December after multiple on- and off-court issues, including a meltdown in a game against Michigan Tech. Anthony Roy, then the nation’s leading scorer at 25.7 points per game, was late to an early December practice and missed a shootaround the next day, prompting Gottlieb to bench him for a game, creating a magnetic field for takes. “That was the first time the guys felt the weight of who I am, how everybody wants to pile on,” Gottlieb says. Roy issued an apology on Instagram, returned in good standing … and broke his ankle two games later. He has not played since. Six-foot-nine Yonatan Levy, an Israeli who averages 9.9 points and 6.3 rebounds per game, has become a viable offensive fulcrum in Roy’s absence … but he didn’t suit up until January due to visa issues.
“It feels like we’ve had three different teams this year,” Ruedinger says.
Bluntly? The available talent is too young — Green Bay ranks 285th in Division I experience, per KenPom — and not talented enough. “John Wooden’s not winning with that group,” says Ground, who spent two weeks vetting the operation in January, at Gottlieb’s request.
Then, of course, there are the mistakes and regrets of someone doing this job for the first time. “Oh, a million of them,” Gottlieb says, throwing his head back. He wishes he’d brought on both a personal assistant and “old head” staffer with knowledge of the Horizon League. He spent the summer installing “no-middle” defensive principles and eventually scrapped them after deciding his group wasn’t athletic enough to play that way. He was too complex too soon with offensive concepts and verbiage before realizing players don’t necessarily understand what “usage rate” is, for example, unless you explain it to them. He says he probably should’ve texted Adam Schefter instead of creating a conflagration on X while he was driving home.
He blames himself for a schedule that was too onerous, both from travel and competition perspectives. “For a first-year coach to be playing the hardest or second-hardest schedule in the league, and to play no Division III (teams) and a really good Division II (team) that has all hometown kids that beats you – like, that’s stupid,” Gottlieb says.
Ah, yes. Michigan Tech and “Nobody U.” A meteor hitting a gas truck parked at a fireworks warehouse.
Objectively, a Dec. 11 news conference included Gottlieb going on a meandering tangent about schedule strength. While discussing a couple conflicting concepts – playing beatable teams while also inspiring locals to come to a game in a Green Bay winter – he used the term “Nobody U.” He could’ve edited himself. He could’ve better focused his message. That didn’t happen, though. And he’s Doug Gottlieb. So when Division II Michigan Tech beat Green Bay a week later, the howls could be heard from outer space.
The talking head-turned-coach, hoisted by his own petard. Even if he didn’t actually, specifically refer to Michigan Tech as “Nobody U.”
The lesson?
“Say less,” Gottlieb says.
Sure. But can he?
“Yeah,” he says. “I just need somebody yelling in my ear, “WRAP!”
He laughs. He insists his two selves will coexist and thrive. He also knows when or if remains an open debate for everyone else.
Multiple players defended their coach’s dual roles. (Brian Hamilton / The Athletic)
A few days with this team, this year, is a ride fit for the bayside amusement park a short drive from the basketball offices.
In the middle of an Oakland University campus still coated with snow that has melted everywhere else, Gottlieb gathers his team following a midday Thursday shootaround. It’s mostly a final rehearsal of all the cuts and shots emphasized in two days of prep for the Grizzlies’ amorphous zone defense. He tells his players to return to their room at the nearby Embassy Suites and close their eyes. Find balance.
“Think of all the things you’re going to do right,” he says.
Twelve minutes before tipoff, Gottlieb finishes his spirited pregame speech by declaring the Phoenix to be the hungriest team in America, then walks into a spartan coaches’ locker room.
“Aaaaaand Marcus is out,” Gottlieb says.
Hall, nursing a sore knee, went through warmups but cannot play. With Roy rehabbing in Wisconsin, that’s two starters and roughly 38 points per game unavailable to begin a two-game conference road swing through Michigan. The Phoenix abide – they’re tied with the Grizzlies at halftime – but are undone by a seven-minute stretch without a made field goal in a 68-54 loss. Still, the mood is not funereal. Green Bay has to make shots. It has to rebound (minus-25 on the glass doesn’t help). Everyone, including the staff – there was an ill-advised and poorly executed decision to double-team the post at half – has to be better. But, in all, Green Bay does not look like one of the worst teams in the country. It’s something.
The next morning, the Phoenix gather in a hotel meeting room for film review and a scout of Detroit Mercy. Before dismissing the group, Gottlieb’s parting words are acute. “All we got is what’s in this room,” he says. “Nobody’s coming to help.” Green Bay’s process from practice to film to shootaround to pregame isn’t substantially different from that of any program, anywhere. This is notable in itself, for those who assume the coaches throw darts to prepare. “In terms of schemes or the build-up for things,” says forward Ryan Wade, who’s had six coaches in his six years of college basketball, “it’s been the same.”
What is different is a head coach sitting in an open-air business center that afternoon, shouting loud enough that a bartender leaves his station to make sure there isn’t a developing emergency in the lobby. And, today, the host of “The Doug Gottlieb Show” has something on his mind. The venom on social media following the Oakland loss got to him. He cannot understand why people take joy in others’ misery. He cannot understand why people don’t appreciate the work he’s put into the life he’s built for himself.
It all gasses up an extended, boiled-over rant.
“My challenge to these people is, when we start winning, I want a mea culpa from every f—- one of you,” Gottlieb says, punctuating the screed. “That’s what I want.”
He signs off around 5 p.m. local time. Green Bay buses to an easygoing shootaround at Calihan Hall. Wade’s parents drive to the team hotel from Ann Arbor and set up a delectable medley of soul food and lumpia for the team when it returns. There’s talk of a spades tournament after everyone eats. Slivers of light on the margins.
The sun comes up on the first day of February. Inside the visitors’ locker room, before a 1 p.m. tipoff against a Detroit Mercy team then 328th-best in the country on KenPom.com, Gottlieb stands before the Phoenix with a question.
“You know what makes a man in this world?” he asks. “Confidence.”
It’s ignition without a spark. For the next couple of hours, Green Bay looks exactly as bad as everyone thinks it is.
A 10-point loss. Nineteen in a row. Even with Hall in the lineup, the offense is unsightly. The Phoenix register just .88 points per possession. They miss 21 of 28 3-pointers. Nothing works. When there’s confusion about whom to foul and when near the end, Gottlieb looks at his staff. “Too many voices,” he says, flatly. It’s a bitter irony following Green Bay down the slide: Everyone wants so badly to fix this that, at times, they do too much and make it worse.
The players slump silently in chairs after handshake lines. In a cross-country locker room doubling as a coaches’ alcove, Green Bay’s coach closes his eyes and leans forward in a folding chair, dropping his head into his hands.
“F—,” Gottlieb says. “I did not expect that.”
Doug Gottlieb on his first year as a head coach: ‘End of the day, I’m a head coach. I got a radio show. We got plenty of time to fix it. We’re all focused on the right things. We’re getting better. There will be better days.’ (Brian Hamilton / The Athletic)
It is impossible to spend any decent amount of time in this orbit and conclude the head coach only kind of cares. He cares. About everything.
A superpower, and a vulnerability.
When Gottlieb discovered last summer that Green Bay did not provide laptops to his players – they were welcome to check one out from the library for two weeks at a time, he was told – he raised $12,000 to rectify the issue. When he invited Ground to vet every part of Green Bay’s operation, top to bottom, he included himself most of all; Ground was impressed by Gottlieb’s leadership, told him to be more composed on the sideline and noted his former point guard doesn’t sleep much.
He also can dine at The Iron Pig, a nearby gastropub, and discuss Caleb the bartender’s dating life, because it’s not the first time the new guy in town has inquired. He sits in Perry’s living room, watching NFL playoff games, and winds up discussing movies and television shows with an important ally’s 17-year-old daughter. “He’s as real as any of the guys I play golf with every Thursday,” Perry says.
Doug Gottlieb is also, inevitably and sometimes exhaustingly, Doug Gottlieb.
He doesn’t like to feed the trolls, he declares near the end of his Friday afternoon radio show, and then addresses one named “Geronimo” anyway. He says it doesn’t matter if people hate him while wondering aloud why anyone wouldn’t like him. He sits on radio row at Super Bowl LIX days before the game at Purdue-Fort Wayne, the Horizon League’s second-place team, inviting more barbs even though he missed one workout back home and the staff had planned for the trip since August. Gottlieb says he’s OK with “everybody dogpiling on me” because his players therefore won’t absorb as much negativity.
Then he says he can’t lie: It’s a lot.
“It’s not earth-shattering to (say) there are points in which you question, should I have done this?” Gottlieb says. “Like what am I doing? I could just be chilling, be an average person doing radio, collecting checks, working three hours a day.”
He sees it, though. The contour of reality in the caricature. The balance, in all things, he has to chase down to make this work. Time is ticking.
“I take the things I say to (the players) and I mean it: If this is my hardest day, I got a pretty good life, right?” he says. “End of the day, I’m a head coach. I got a radio show. We got plenty of time to fix it. We’re all focused on the right things. We’re getting better. There will be better days.”
Hanging behind the basement bar from which a basketball coach hosts that radio show, there’s a print Gottlieb inherited from the house purchase, one of several nautically themed decorations on the walls. It depicts a small boat climbing a colossal wave.
Smooth Seas Never Made A Skilled Sailor, it reads.
The dock is right there. Always is. And there’s Doug Gottlieb, riding out the storm.
(Illustration: Dan Goldfarb / The Athletic; photos: Candice Ward, Jason Mowry / Icon Sportswire / Getty Images)
