For new Wisconsin-Green Bay men’s basketball coach Doug Gottlieb, a wintry Tuesday in early February began at home in the still-dark morning, and after a weather-related travel delay continued in Tulsa, Oklahoma, followed by a short drive to visit his former Oklahoma State teammate, Brian Montonati, the head basketball coach at nearby Owasso High School.
Starters on the 2000 team that advanced to the Elite Eight before falling to eventual runner-up Florida, Gottlieb and Montonati caught up around the white board, spending about an hour diagramming plays. As a bonus, Montonati’s son, Jalen, is one of the top prospects in the 2026 recruiting class — something Gottlieb and his former teammates “take a special pride in,” he said.
This was going to be one of those days: Gottlieb had to drive to Independence, Kansas, for a nighttime junior-college matchup, and then navigate through an incoming ice storm to get back to Green Bay in time for Wednesday’s practice. In the end, Gottlieb had to drive to Oklahoma City for another morning flight, sleeping about two hours before getting back on the road.
Alas, such is life for a college basketball coach, especially one combing the country and tapping into his network to reverse his program’s exceptionally unimpressive start, and Gottlieb, 49, is no different.
“I knew he could coach,” said former Stephen F. Austin coach Kyle Keller, who was an assistant at Oklahoma State during Gottlieb’s senior season. “He was so advanced with his thoughts, and he saw the game ahead of everything else. He just has a deep knowledge and passion. It all starts with passion. Doug’s passion for the game and for people, that’s who he is.”
Then again, his budding tenure in coaching may be one of the most unique in modern college basketball history.
He hadn’t coached a day in college before being hired last May. He continues to tape his longtime radio show, carving out three hours every afternoon to maintain a broadcasting career that began more than two decades ago, not long after the end of his playing career.
“Doug has been successful at everything he’s done. He’s beaten the odds at everything he’s done, from being a high-level player himself to his well-documented profession,” said Kurt Voss, a Green Bay-area businessperson and prominent supporter of the basketball program.
“I’m just one of those who believe that winners win, and he’s won his whole life. Now he’s going to have to figure out how to win at the college basketball level. And I have no doubt he’s going to do that, he’s going to figure it out. Because a guy like that doesn’t allow himself to lose over the long haul.”
With a healthy amount of swagger, Gottlieb has tried to balance his two careers with decidedly mixed results: Green Bay is 4-27 overall and in last place in the Horizon League heading into Tuesday’s Horizon League tournament opener against Oakland, though the Phoenix have outplayed their record while managing injuries, attrition and one of the youngest rosters in the country.
“I always felt that he felt he could be a better coach than 99 percent of the guys coaching,” said longtime ESPN analyst Fran Fraschilla, a former colleague of Gottlieb’s with the network. “I honestly always felt he could do this job better than 99 percent of us. That’s Doug in everything. And that’s why he’s so good on the radio.”
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Doug Gottlieb balances basketball job and radio show
A staple of afternoon sports-talk radio since 2006 across three prominent networks — ESPN, CBS Sports and, since 2017, Fox Sports — ‘The Doug Gottlieb Show’ has made him a college basketball celebrity.
Perhaps as much so as the biggest names in college coaching, Gottlieb’s arrival at games, practices and tournaments can be an event — making him the center of attention at places such as Independence, where the athletics director, sports information director and others “were all about the radio show,” he said.
“There in a nutshell is why I’m the right guy for coaching and for this job,” said Gottlieb. “You know, here I come in and because of my broadcasting, people knew I was coming, right, and it was kind of a big thing.’
On the Tuesday last month, Gottlieb hosted the show from Montonati’s office; he got back home the next day just in time to record Wednesday’s episode. The setup is fairly basic and easy to replicate, requiring only a quiet space, a microphone and a laptop to record the video portion of each episode to post online.
While the Phoenix routinely practice in the morning, leaving Gottlieb free to record his show in the afternoon, his coaching staff will conduct team activities in the rare case of a scheduling conflict. Recently, Gottlieb made a midweek trip to New Orleans to host his show on media row at the Super Bowl, causing him to miss a Thursday practice before returning in time to lead Friday’s workout and coach Green Bay’s loss that Saturday against Purdue Fort Wayne.
The result, Gottlieb said, has been “great promotion for all parties,” making Green Bay one of the “very few” programs in college basketball commonly discussed on a national platform.
“Of what’s being talked about, there’s like 10 or 15 teams and mine’s one of them. You know, we’re going to eventually turn that to a positive, but that’s reality anyway.”
The show also has made Gottlieb a lightning rod on social media and elsewhere. On one episode earlier this season, he called LeBron James a “bad basketball parent” for his role in elevating his son, Bronny, despite mixed reviews from talent evaluators. Last week, James reveled in Green Bay’s record in a post on X, trolling Gottlieb with a string of laughing-face emojis.
There was also criticism about calling opponent Michigan Tech ‘Nobody U’ before Green Bay lost to the Division II school in December, though Gottlieb said the comments were misconstrued.
But Gottlieb has a long history of dealing with the negative side of being in the public eye. His college career started at Notre Dame, but he was forced to transfer following his freshman season after being caught stealing and using three credit cards from students. That was almost 30 years ago, and it’s still brought up when he comments on social media.
“Luckily, I’ve got crocodile skin,” said Gottlieb. “You know, I was always told I should moisturize more. But it’s very normal for me to be a lightning rod on social media. Really, I used to take it really, really personal, and sometimes you still do take it personally.”
A college basketball coaching career starting from scratch
While an established talk-show veteran, Gottlieb is a coaching neophyte whose only previous on-the-sideline experience before Green Bay came as an assistant coach for Team USA under Bruce Pearl at the 2009 Maccabiah Games and as the head coach of the gold medal-winning team at the 2017 games in Jerusalem.
But he’d been a contender for roughly a dozen openings over the years, coming close to landing the Tulane job in 2016 and, one year later, the position at Oklahoma State that eventually went to former coach Mike Boynton. In his closest brush with on-court coaching experience on the college level, Gottlieb spent last year as a consultant under Boynton, who was fired at the end of the season and replaced by former Western Kentucky coach Steve Lutz.
And coaching is in his blood: Gottlieb’s father, Bob, was the head coach at Jacksonville State and Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and a fixture on the Southern California AAU circuit; and his brother, Gregg, has worked at six men’s and women’s Division I programs since 1995.
“I think I always assumed I would coach,” he said. “Everybody close to me assumed I would always coach. And then the broadcasting thing just kind of happened.”
The move into coaching has come with an intense learning curve. That Gottlieb walked into this position without paying the same dues as others in the profession — most spend years, even decades, as an assistant before earning the promotion — has joined his deeply opinionated broadcasting style as a second source of schadenfreude amid Green Bay’s forgettable season.
“There’s only 360 of these jobs,” Keller said. “How many of them skip as many steps as he skipped to become that CEO? I hope that the envy or the jealously doesn’t come out. But I think you’d have to be a really strong person not to feel that way.”
Said Fraschilla, “The unfortunate thing for Doug is that usually you can grow into becoming a coach in anonymity at a place like Green Bay. But because of Doug’s persona and his fame, if you will, and the fact that he’s been very opinionated over the years, there’s always a target on him to see him fail.
“His opinionated personality and the fact that he’s been in the talk-radio realm for many years, lent itself to having a lot of people who probably didn’t root for him. I think it’s more that than any kind of jealously. It’s not like 10,000 people were going after the Green Bay job, you know what I mean.”
Green Bay’s season to forget and also remember
It’s been a nightmarish season from the start through this week’s expected finish, raising legitimate questions about whether Gottlieb can possibly juggle the time demands and constraints of simultaneously working two high-profile careers. Another question asks what Gottlieb would do if this balancing act becomes too much to handle: After decades in broadcasting, would he choose to toss that aside in favor of focusing solely on coaching?
“It’s been really hard,” Gottlieb said of his first season. “I guess the frustration is, anything that can go wrong has gone wrong. And I still love the job.”
The Phoenix opened his debut with two wins in five games before dropping 21 games in a row, a 90-day stretch of misery that ended with last month’s win against Wright State. Green Bay heads into the Horizon tournament having two wins in its last five, with all three losses coming by a single-digit margin.
“There’s no doubt in my mind there’s been growth throughout the season,” said Voss. “The biggest thing I see is no one has given up. And it’d be easy for a team with that record for the players to give up, for the coaches to give up, and I’ve seen none of that.”
There are mitigating factors that supersede Gottlieb’s inexperience. The biggest is his late start, in May, months after most new coaches are hired. That left Gottlieb and his staff way behind in roster management, resulting in a 17-player roster that has just two seniors and nine redshirt freshmen. Another issue has been injuries. Leading scorer Anthony Roy, who averaged 25.7 points in 11 games, has been out since December. Another offseason addition, 7-foot-1 Oklahoma State transfer Isaiah Miranda, played in just seven games before leaving the program.
One positive factor is Gottlieb’s deep connections throughout the sport, birthed in part by the relationships developed by his father on the AAU level. “I’m not surprised that Doug inherited the rolodex, so to speak,” Fraschilla said.
This support system is “an army of people that want to help,” said Gottlieb.
“Coaches are a really good fraternity. Obviously, we’re losing games now, but you wouldn’t believe how many of them have reached out. ‘Hey, it’s your first year, keep plugging.’ Keep learning, you know.”
And this isn’t even the program’s worst season this decade: Green Bay went 3-29 in 2022-23 and a combined 16-71 from 2020-23, though current Wyoming coach Sundance Wicks went 18-14 and tied for third in the Horizon standings last season. Former Green Bay coach Dick Bennett went 5-23 in his debut season in 1985-86 but went on to win a program-record 187 games.
Unsurprisingly to those who know him — and those who know his radio show — Gottlieb’s confidence remains unshaken.
“He’s never failed. Even when he’s hit adversity, he bounces back and rises up even higher. Adversity, he just looks in the face and keeps marching on,” Keller said.
“Don’t think he’s not going to learn from this year and say, ‘Man, I’m not going to make these mistakes again.’ Don’t count him out. He looks at this stuff, like, ‘You better get your licks in now. Because it ain’t happening next year.’ I will be shocked if he doesn’t turn that thing around quicker versus later.”
At his birthday celebration at a Green Bay hotel in January following a loss to Indiana University-Indianapolis, Gottlieb told friends and well-wishers that they should do this again next year — and when they do, they can look back and laugh about how far the Phoenix have risen, he said.
“This place is going to be a great program,” said Gottlieb. “And they want it so bad. We all want it so bad.”
This post appeared first on USA TODAY
