The Doug Gottlieb coaching experiment is going even worse than you imagined

Coaching a college basketball team is hard. You simply can't do the best possible job while spending 15 hours a week talking about which NFL quarterbacks are overrated. Doug Gottlieb is proving that.

Coaching a college basketball team is a job for obsessives and grinders, people willing to sacrifice their personal lives and sanity for the love of ball. When national championship-winning Virginia head coach Tony Bennett shocked the sport by retiring in October, he cited the need to fully commit to the job. “If you're going to do it, you gotta be all-in. If you do it halfhearted, it's not fair to the university and those young men.”

And then there is Doug Gottlieb, the Fox Sports Radio host who thinks he can coach a college hoops team in his spare time. In May, Gottlieb was hired as head coach of the men’s basketball program at Wisconsin-Green Bay. Gottlieb had no serious experience as a coach at any level¹, but skipped the line because of his prominence in media,

Hiring unqualified famous people to get an overlooked athletics program #trending is a bad idea several schools have had recently. (There may also be a few notable unqualified famous people getting important jobs in other fields at the moment… but I digress.) In October, I wrote about the Trent Dilfer Debacle at UAB. But at least Dilfer did the bare minimum to commit to coaching cosplay, quitting his career of sounding simultaneously bored and angry while saying “I just think the Dallas Cowboys need to get serious about winning” and getting paid several hundred thousand dollars to do that for some reason.

Gottlieb hasn’t done that. He’s still doing five shows a week, spending two hours on the air every weekday while leading a Division I basketball program. This week, he has recorded episodes about “the it-factor of Jayden Daniels” and “whether or not Sam Darnold is a one-season wonder.” Meanwhile, the Phoenix is 2-16 and 0-7 in Horizon League play. They went 18-14 last year, so they’ve already surpassed last season’s loss total with two months to go.

That’s the thing about phoenixes. Everybody talks about how they rise from the ashes, but to do that, you have to spontaneously burst into flames every once in a while. That’s where Gottlieb has them right now.

Leave your grievances about Gottlieb’s public persona behind². The Gottlieb Gambit isn’t failing because his takes are bad, or because of his penchant for beefing with his fellow media members. It was doomed because coaching is a job, and a really hard one. It’s not something you can do in between segments about the NFL coaching carousel.

A quick breakdown of UW-Green Bay’s disaster year so far.

Gottlieb’s team is 2-16 and has lost 12 games in a row, including their first seven matchups in Horizon League play. Every other team in the Horizon League already has at least two conference wins, so climbing out of dead last in the league seems unlikely at this point. They’re not particularly close to winning, either—their average margin of defeat in Horizon League play is 17.1 points. Their closest league game was a 9-point loss to IU-Indianapolis, the team ranked 320th in Ken Pomeroy’s rankings. This despite Green Bay going 18-14 last season.

They even lost a home game to Division II Michigan Tech. (The Yooper Hoopers!) It’s rare for Division I teams to lose to D2 teams—Green Bay had won 25 in a row against lower-level opponents. Adding insult to injury, Michigan Tech’s best players in the win were a former Green Bay high school hoops star and the son of Green Bay’s leading scorer in their 1995 NCAA Tournament upset over Jason Kidd’s Cal team³. Michigan Tech built a better team than Gottlieb has in Green Bay’s backyard, despite being in the wrong division.

In just one year under Gottlieb, Green Bay has dropped from 12th in opposing 3-point percentage to 347th—from the top 20 to the bottom 20. Green Bay is dead last in Division I in offensive rebounding: 364th out of 364. You may wonder whether I’m referring to total offensive rebounds per game or a rate stat like offensive rebound rate. The answer: They’re last in both. They average 5.4 offensive rebounds per game, while the team in 363rd place, Canisius, averages 6.5 offensive rebounds per game, more than a full rebound per game better. DO YOU REALIZE HOW BAD YOU HAVE TO BE TO BE THAT MUCH WORSE THAN THE SECOND-WORST TEAM? It takes a lack of talent, low effort, and misguided strategy.

Gottlieb has also had early issues dealing with his players. Gottlieb spent the early part of the season beefing with his star transfer, Anthony Roy, who averages 25.7 points per game, the most in Division I. At first, Gottlieb threatened to cut his minutes, then he benched Roy outright after Roy missed a shootaround. (Roy is now injured, and they’re 0-8 without him.) Two of his other transfers, Isaiah Miranda and Muodubem Muoneke, have left the team mid-season. Miranda, a 7-foot-1 center ranked as a 4-star prospect in high school, could presumably have been useful to the worst offensive rebounding team in the country, but never played again after a technical foul and sideline outburst during the Michigan Tech game.

A couple of grains of salt. Ken Pomeroy points out that his preseason projections had Green Bay as the 309th-ranked team in the country, and since they’ve only fallen to 330th in his rankings, Gottlieb isn’t underperforming by that much. And Green Bay has been Very, Very Bad in the recent past. Gottlieb is quick to point out that two years ago, the Phoenix were “the worst team in Division I basketball.” That’s true. In 2022-23, Green Bay went 3-29, tied for the worst record in the country.

But broadly, Green Bay men’s hoops has been a successful program. In between 1985 and 2020, Green Bay had five coaches. All five had multiple 20-win seasons and left the school with a winning record⁴. They only turned bad when they hired Will Ryan, the son of longtime Wisconsin head coach Bo, in 2020. But they quickly bounced back last year under Sundance “Sunny” Wicks, going 18-14 in Wicks’ lone season before heading back to his home state of Wyoming. The bad times were a blip instantly erased by a competent coach. Now they’re back under Gottlieb.

The logic of the coach-slash-radio host doesn’t make sense.

Gottlieb negotiated his radio career into his new contract with Green Bay. According to Sportico, he signed a six-page conflict management document which outlines how his two jobs will mesh. The Green Bay Press-Gazette reports Gottlieb told the school his second job will require about 15 hours of his time per week⁵. Per Sportico, the contract reportedly specifies he must prioritize his coaching job, which should be fascinating for lawyers to tuck into when Green Bay attempts to fire Gottlieb for cause in 14 months.

Gottlieb and the school’s athletic director have repeatedly shot down the idea that the radio job detracts from Gottlieb’s coaching mission. In fact, Gottlieb has claimed that his ongoing media career will help Green Bay, particularly in the NIL department. After all, they didn’t hire Gottlieb because of his coaching history or qualifications—”none” and “none”—but because his presence could, in some way, boost the program. The idea, I suppose, is that Gottlieb’s hundreds of thousands of followers and listeners will want to help him out and donate to Green Bay’s program.

I just don’t buy it. To be frank, I spend a lot of time thinking about why people would give money to something they could experience for free, like a college basketball team… or a newsletter about college basketball. The key, I think, is investment. People want to feel like they have a part in making something better.

Because I love you, the people who subscribe to this newsletter, I listened to several episodes of Gottlieb’s show this week. I’m not even sure he did a single segment about the sport of college basketball once all week long. It’s pretty much exclusively takes about NFL quarterbacks and coaches. (During his Wednesday show, he complained on-air that it was tough coming up with material because it had been two days since the last playoff but was too early to preview the next round. You are head coach of a Division I basketball team. Talk about that!) He only tangentially talked about his interesting side job during the episodes I heard⁶.

Long story short: It’s hard to imagine somebody becoming invested in the ups-and-downs of Green Bay hoops and the need to help them attain better players after listening to Gottlieb’s radio show. His listeners may like him (although I suspect many people listen to talk radio specifically because they do not like the people they are listening to) but they aren’t getting hooked on the Phoenix.

Maybe I’m wrong, and Gottlieb has helped Green Bay assemble the strongest NIL game in the Horizon League… but, I mean…you’d think they’d have better players.

Hiring Gottlieb was an insult to coaches.

I get worked up by situations like this one and the Dilfer Debacle because fundamentally, I have a respect for the coaching profession. (It might not come through when I’m talking about how stupid certain coaches are… but it’s true.)

Coaching is a job, and it’s a hard one. Most coaches have to grind their way up the ladder working long hours at low-paying, zero-recognition jobs. If the team doesn’t win games you lose your job and have to relocate your family. They put in all that work hoping that one day they can get a job like the one Gottlieb has… and Gottlieb isn’t even treating it like a full-time job!

I suspect Gottlieb has respect for the coaching profession, too. He’s the son of a coach—his father Bob was the head coach at Wisconsin-Milwaukee, one of Green Bay’s Horizon League opponents⁷. When he talks about how coaching a college basketball team is his lifelong dream, it sounds genuine. In his various roles over the years, he always perked up when he gets to talk about the nitty-gritty of college basketball. I’ve always appreciated that.

Sports radio is a job too. It’s not nearly as difficult as coaching. You can carry a show with charisma and the natural ability to rile people up rather than research or deep knowledge on a topic. Perhaps Gottlieb’s success in such a superficial field skewed his ability to be realistic about what it would take to be successful in his new job. How could winning games at Green Bay be harder than getting through the C-block on a Wednesday in the offseason?

But now, he’s going head-to-head with a bunch of guys who got their jobs by spending dozens of hours per week watching game tape to find a weakness in how their upcoming opponents defend high ball screens. How are you going to beat them, Doug? By asking them if they think Justin Herbert is overrated?

If coaching is truly Gottlieb’s dream job, he should commit to it full-time. I just don’t believe that somebody can get the best performance out of a college basketball team while devoting so much time to something as tangential and frivolous as Gottlieb’s show. The job is too hard, and the results are proving that.

And even if the job was doable in fewer hours, the whole set-up sends a horrible message. Coaches are supposed to be leaders. Why should players give full commitment to Gottlieb when Gottlieb isn’t giving full effort to them? Why should donors give their hard-earned money to help Green Bay get better when Gottlieb won’t even give up his second paycheck so he can devote himself full-time to coaching Green Bay?

So Gottlieb has a choice: He can keep coaching, or keep talking. He clearly wants to keep cashing two checks from his two jobs people would kill to have. But let me tell you, Doug: If you stay in last place in your conference, the choice of which job to keep isn’t going to be yours.

1. Gottlieb did serve as head coach of Team USA at the Maccabiah Games for Jewish athletes, but that’s a couple of weeks coaching at a not particularly high level, rather than a full-time Division I coaching gig. (And yes, Gottlieb continued doing his radio show while coaching that time, too.)

2. Also, it seems like every mention of Doug Gottlieb leads to people bringing up the time he stole his teammate’s credit cards during his college career. We can move on. Obviously a stupid thing to do but not a career-defining one, especially as Gottlieb has talked many times about how stupid it was. There are so many other things to run with when criticizing Doug Gottlieb besides the dumbest thing he did in college.

3. Social media ran with the idea that Gottlieb called Michigan Tech “Nobody U” in one of his press conferences before losing to the Huskies. That’s not really what happened—Gottlieb actually spoke pretty respectfully about Michigan Tech’s program with solid detail. What he actually said is that it would be hard to get fans to come to games if his team was playing “Nobody U,” but that Green Bay wasn’t doing that, and that every team on Green Bay’s schedule was capable of beating them. (Which has proven extremely true.)

4. Their peak came under Dick Bennett, the father of Tony, the national champion head coach quoted at the beginning of the story. The Phoenix went to three NCAA tournaments under Bennett.

5. Keep in mind, Gottlieb does 10 hours per week of live radio content, Gottlieb produces regular “bonus” episodes for his show’s podcast feed and intermittently releases a college basketball-themed podcast called All Ball. So if he only works 15 hours a week on his media career, he essentially does no prep work at all. Gonna be honest: I’m jealous.

6. The #1 thing I learned about Green Bay basketball listening to the show came when Dikembe Mutombo was referenced, and Gottlieb said he has asked Green Bay’s Senegalese-born center, Mouhamadou Cisse, to talk in the third person, as Mutombo allegedly did upon moving to America. OK then.

7. The Phoenix’s success under Tony Bennett’s dad but struggles under Bo Ryan’s son and Bob Gottlieb’s son proves that they should only hire the fathers of good coaches, not the sons of good coaches. Unclear how to put this observation into practice without a time machine, but noted.