No, the Internet Is Not Being Too Hard on Doug Gottlieb

A rebuttal to Ken Pomeroy

Yesterday, Ken Pomeroy—the most well-respected critical thinker in college basketball—took it upon himself to defend Green Bay head coach and Fox Sports Radio host Doug Gottlieb amid a deluge of clowning from fans online that kicked into overdrive following Wednesday afternoon’s home loss to Division II Michigan Tech.

I respect Pomeroy quite a lot. I’ve been a subscriber to his website for five years. His metric analysis is second to none and the musings on his blog often open my eyes to fascinating things I never would have noticed otherwise. That said, I find his take on the Gottlieb situation to fundamentally miss the mark in a somewhat baffling way, and it irked me enough to write a rebuttal, so here goes.

The main issue, to me, comes at the very beginning:

Well, America, you’ve done it. You’ve made me write a piece defending Doug Gottlieb. At least defending the coach, not the media personality.

Doug Gottlieb the coach and Doug Gottlieb the media personality are one inseparable entity. That’s what made this hire so notable in the first place. To separate one from the other not only removes vital context from the events that have caused Gottlieb so much public scorn, but also bestows upon him undue credibility in the arena of college basketball coaching.

Doug Gottlieb is a Division I head basketball coach because he’s a media personality. Prior to accepting the Green Bay job, he had no collegiate coaching experience at any level—not even as an assistant—and the extent of his basketball coaching experience was two stints coaching Team USA in the Maccabiah Games.¹ He got the Green Bay gig because of his chops as an analyst (not to mention his father being a former head coach elsewhere in the University of Wisconsin system, as highlighted multiple times in Green Bay’s press release announcing his hire).

Being a good analyst is a helpful basketball talent, to be clear, but it is not the same talent as being a good head coach. Distinguishing Gottlieb’s coaching career from his media career leaves you with nothing, especially because by holding both jobs at once, he hasn’t tried to distinguish the two himself.

And don’t get me wrong: I fully support hiring from outside traditional backgrounds. Elsewhere in the realm of basketball coaching, under far different circumstances, JJ Redick went from media mogul immediately to head coach of the Los Angeles Lakers with no prior experience. There’ve been some growing pains there as well, but Redick has handled them far more gracefully, in large part because he stopped podcasting and has put his full professional effort into being an NBA head coach. Time will tell whether that experiment pans out, but at least Redick has seemed willing to learn.

Gottlieb, on the other hand, has still been his normal, overly combative self because his base instinct is still to draw attention to himself and entertain his radio audience. That’s how you get stuff like the Adam Schefter tiff Pomeroy mentioned in his piece.

People aren’t bashing Gottlieb for this because they think he’s wrong. In fact, he’s clearly correct and Schefter’s tweet is obviously misleading. The problem is that the overwhelming majority of college basketball head coaches aren’t routinely going out of their way to pick fights for Twitter clout, especially while their team is on a seven-game losing streak, because they’re too busy coaching basketball. Schefter pointing this out was like dunking on a Fisher-Price hoop.

This, not his team’s poor performance, is why people are quick to laugh at Gottlieb any chance they get. It’s really hard to balance having a snarky, me-first national sports radio persona (and posting habits) with the team-first program building mentality required to succeed in Division I basketball, and thus far—at least in the public eye—Gottlieb has been terrible at it.

Nothing has been more indicative of this dichotomy than the meme calendar tweet Gottlieb posted on Dec. 3, which I can’t believe is still up after the Michigan Tech loss.

This is a deeply weird thing for an active head coach to post publicly. Taken at face value, it suggests you’re phoning it in for an entire month, which represents about a quarter of the regular season. Taken as the engagement bait it’s clearly meant to be, it suggests that you think it would be funny if you didn’t care about your job, in which you lead a devoted team of players and assistant coaches to perform for thousands of caring fans. There’s no way to read this that’s favorable to Gottlieb’s coaching effort, so obviously when he coaches his team to a home Division II loss on a date marked “Don’t even pretend anymore”, the dunks will be immediate and plentiful. But it’s probably doing wonders for his radio numbers.

All of this is completely ignoring the fact that Gottlieb is often simply a jerk, as Pomeroy concedes.

I readily acknowledge the goofball that is Gottlieb. He’s generally been critical of transfers despite being a two-time transfer himself. He was reluctant to support players getting paid despite having made purchases with stolen credit cards as a freshman. He mostly seems to dump on the current generation as inferior to his own. And as others have pointed out, it’s not hard to imagine him clowning another coach if that coach was simultaneously coaching a D-I basketball team to a 2-11 record while holding down a completely different job.

“Goofball” is certainly not the word I would have chosen here, but that’s not the point. Taking all of the above together, Gottlieb tends to come across as someone who thinks he already has all the answers, even though he’s essentially taking a senior-level course with none of the prerequisites.

Unsurprisingly, this has already blown up in his face with the now-infamous “Nobody U” comment. Pomeroy is correct to point out that the quote from Gottlieb was taken somewhat out of context in that he was not specifically referring to Michigan Tech as “Nobody U”. But the full quote from Gottlieb, which came in the postgame press conference after their loss to Milwaukee on Dec. 11, was lamenting that the Horizon League wanted their members to schedule some Division II teams in the non-conference slate, and Michigan Tech is the only one of those that Green Bay scheduled.

The league is like, “you got these tiers on who to schedule”, and part of the reason I wanna play better teams is, like, it’s two degrees outside and snowing. Like, y’know, I don’t really like the idea of Nobody U comin’ in here and, like, I always thought “what do we learn playing a game where we win by 20?” But there’s a methodology to it and I’m gonna have to adjust moving forward with the schedule.

Let's first set aside whether Gottlieb was actually talking about Michigan Tech and consider that the wide majority of college basketball coaches don’t talk about their games this way. Not only does this turn of phrase show flagrant disrespect for potential opponents, but it also flies in the face of the mantra that every moment can be a teaching moment. He sounds like a sports radio host on the mic, not a coach.

Gottlieb has been very adamant that he wasn’t talking about Michigan Tech, but only after the press conference clip started going viral following the loss. First, the game against Michigan Tech was “scheduling up”.

I mean this respectfully because they earned this win fair and square, but literally who is Michigan Tech? They’re not one of the notably powerful D2 teams. They’d gone 21-37 over the two seasons prior to this one. They’re not currently receiving a single vote in the Division II NABC Coaches Poll. Their last NCAA Tournament appearance was in 2021 and they have never reached the Elite Eight (which has the same relative prestige as the Division I Final Four). From an overall program standpoint, they are the epitome of Nobody U, no matter how high they are in the D2 Massey Rankings.²

Then, on his radio show Thursday, Gottlieb doubled down and added that Michigan Tech was also “good” because they have a lot of players from the Green Bay area on their team. He’s acted baffled that so many people have blown this incredibly dubious quote so far out of proportion, all the while not showing a hint of accountability or self-reflection. A more experienced coach would have walked away from this fight a long time ago. But it sure is good radio.

Pomeroy spends most of the rest of his piece detailing how Green Bay was likely always going to be very bad in Year 1 of the Gottlieb Era because Doug was hired in mid-May and had very little time to put his roster together.

And things have gone poorly for Gottlieb so far, but not that poorly, at least relative to pre-season expectations. Gottlieb took the job in May, weeks after most new coaches get to take over. It would be difficult to build a competent roster anywhere that late in the offseason, let alone at a middling Horizon League program. Green Bay started the season #309 in my ratings. They were supposed to suck.

This is a totally reasonable explanation for why Green Bay is so bad this year. Equally reasonable to me is the fact that their head coach is essentially treating it as a second job, but Pomeroy disagrees.

Part of the reason for the ridicule is that Gottlieb is undertaking a bizarre experiment whereby his primary source of income is still from hosting a national radio show five days a week. That’s pretty silly but I don’t blame Gottlieb for this. It’s kind of admirable that he convinced an athletic director of a Division-I school to allow him to maintain a completely different job while coaching the basketball team.

In any case, Green Bay is currently #328 on KenPom, and that’s without even accounting for the Division II home loss because KenPom rightly ignores non-D1 games. No matter how you slice it, the team has underperformed. But Pomeroy implores us to pump the breaks on declaring Gottlieb a bad coach because, measuring by current rating relative to preseason rating, he’s only been kind of bad.

He only ranks 10th-worst among the 35 rookie coaches this season. Barring a complete meltdown, he’ll be firmly in the range of a normal deviation from preseason expectation.

That’s an extremely flattering way to spin the fact that Gottlieb entered the season with very low expectations and has thus far failed them. What exactly has he done to earn the benefit of the doubt? Offensive linchpin Anthony Roy was injured for the Michigan Tech game, but nearly every D1 team should still be able to handle a team of Michigan Tech’s stature in those conditions. I don’t mean to fully excuse the players who actually lost the game, but a good coach can make the most out of the least, and even a decent one would have had enough contingency plans to make things work for at least this game. Gottlieb didn’t.

There are thousands and thousands of seasoned basketball coaches chomping at the bit to coach at the Division I level. It’s mildly exasperating to see one of a large but finite number of D1 coaching positions be given to a novice who behaves the way Doug Gottlieb does. Perhaps he will someday improve enough to make this whole saga seem like a minor bump on the road to success, but he’ll need three things to accomplish that: a full offseason to build a roster, more effort in distinguishing Coach Doug from Radio Host Doug, and more experience to avoid rookie mistakes. The first thing will be a given next year, but it’s not clear to me that he actually desires the second thing, and that’ll make the third thing really hard to come by.

1. 2009 as an assistant under Bruce Pearl and 2017 as head coach

2. #27 at time of publication