Doug Gottlieb fights back: Radio host-turned-coach takes on car crashes, snow, LeBron James and lots of losing

GREEN BAY, Wis. — Doug Gottlieb walks down a back hallway in the Kress Center and into what he calls the “f— tunnel,” the path he takes from the belly of the arena where his University of Wisconsin-Green Bay Phoenix men’s basketball team has just lost its 20th consecutive game. As we enter the gym, the tunnel earns its nickname.

“F—,” the first-year coach says, looking down at his phone. “I think someone hit my car.”

We hit the exit together, and the glacial air hits us as we open the back door of the Kress Center. To our right, a campus police officer is taking notes on his computer in his warm vehicle. To our left, two cars at the end of a loading dock — a Nissan Kicks and a Hummer EV — sit whopper-jawed. 

The police officer takes Gottlieb’s information and informs us Northern Kentucky’s team bus, shortly after handing Green Bay a 73-60 loss, backed right into his Hummer, and someone else’s Kicks, before leaving town. They left nothing behind to alert anyone besides proof of the incident, which was picked up by the school’s surveillance system. Gottlieb shared the video with CBS Sports. 

His Tesla with 250,000 miles on it burned in the Palisades fire in January, so he can’t help but laugh at his amassing misfortunes on and off the court. His leading scorer, Anthony Roy, hasn’t played since injuring his foot in December. His signature midseason acquisition, Yonatan Levy, suffered a concussion in practice earlier in the week and couldn’t play vs. NKU. Now his car’s been smacked in the parking lot after a game on Valentine’s Day in the middle of a snow storm by the team that just handed him his latest loss.

“Whatever could go wrong, has gone wrong,” Gottlieb says. 

At Green Bay, there’s no front-row parking for the head coach with some fancy nameplate. So Gottlieb parked just outside a loading zone on this night because the wind chill is hovering near zero, the snow is coming down hard enough to affect visibility and, frankly, because it’s the closest spot for him to sneak in the back door of the offices into the Kress.

The bus leaves a scuff that may buff out if he’s lucky, but it’s noticeable. It’s beside the point. On a night when NKU ruined one of the last chances for his team to get a win in 2025, it’s salt in the wound that the opposing team on its way out of town managed to make a bad night worse. 

A new low in a season full of them. Or so he thinks. 

That is until less than 12 hours later, his car is hit again — this time by a smaller vehicle that manages to inflict twice the damage.

“I was driving home behind a snow plow,” Gottlieb says, “and then out of nowhere he just put it in reverse. I tried backing up, but he didn’t see me. Next thing I know he just f—ing nails me.”

Two weeks prior, he’d been pulled over and given a warning by a campus police officer for not having a license plate on his vehicle. The same campus police officer rolls up to the scene of the accident, and this time gives him a $160 citation for not acting on the previous warning. 

In many a college town, the head coach might be given some lenience for not getting around to routine car ownership management. After all, he’d been in New Orleans for Super Bowl week working for Fox Sports — which he continues to do hosting a five-days-a-week radio show while coaching — and the throws of conference play coaching a college basketball team has sucked dry any extracurricular plans. Reluctantly, he tells the officer of his chaotic schedule and admits he doesn’t even own a screwdriver. Switching the plates out was supposed to be done by one of his assistants, but alas.

The officer doesn’t bite.

“I’ve never heard of such a schedule,” he tells Gottlieb. “That’s not possible.”

The 49-year-old Gottlieb is getting hit from all angles in Green Bay these days — on social media by the likes of Adam Schefter and LeBron James (we’ll get to that soon), in real life from all sorts of vehicles, and now in the pocketbook by this police officer standing in front of him who is fresh out of warnings to give. Gottlieb welcomed CBS Sports to town this month to show his commitment to the job that had him relocate to Wisconsin from snowplow-less Southern California and to provide context for the team with the worst record in Division I this season, the now 3-26 Phoenix. 

Gottlieb walks away, antifreeze leaking onto the snowy road, convinced of two things: that the officer didn’t know he’s the school’s head men’s basketball coach, and that his efforts to rid bad luck and negativity the day prior by burning sage incense during the team’s shootaround seemingly had the opposite effect. 

Josh Moon, the athletic director at Green Bay since 2021, expected some blowback when he made Gottlieb the last hire among vacant Division I jobs. Moon figured there may be some bumps along the way that would come with hiring a first-time coach, allowing him to continue to host a national radio show and naming him as Sundance Wicks’ successor in mid-May — when the talent pool had already been picked over. But the negative noise surrounding the program has been more intense and consistent throughout this season than he anticipated.

“We didn’t expect the negativity, at least not to this level,” he tells CBS Sports. “I think some of that stuff has just been surprising in how dark the comments can be.”

Backlash was swift and especially unrelenting when Gottlieb benched Roy, then the nation’s scoring leader, in December. The benching came after an accumulation of small things like being late to practice, and the message was received. 

Roy returned two games later after earning back his coach’s trust, but he hasn’t played since after breaking his ankle vs. UCSB two games later.

“I was doing what I thought I needed to do to hold him accountable,” Gottlieb said. “But it was such an intense thing that the enormity of it just crushed us. We were all just overwhelmed by the social media stuff. It got to us.”

Days later came the home loss to Division II Michigan Tech. The 72-70 defeat came after Gottlieb had referred to weaker opponents as “Nobody U” — without naming any team in particular — but the assumptions were already made. The next few days were spent in damage control.

All of that was just a drip of doubt from what Gottlieb calls “haters” in comparison to the downpour LeBron James unleashed on Feb. 17, one day after Green Bay beat Wright State to improve to 3-24, when he posted about the Phoenix’s struggles on social media and made a jab at giving him “credit” — a veiled shot at Gottlieb’s infamous incident as a player at Notre Dame where he used credit cards of three students in 1996 and was ultimately forced to transfer from the school.

The day I arrived in town, a lengthy feature on Gottlieb had been published at The Athletic that put Gottlieb’s lack of success and unique setup in the national spotlight. Not that he needed more spotlight: Gottlieb’s history with LeBron — more recently, with James’ son Bronny, whom he has said might not start on Green Bay and was being treated like a “Make-a-Wish kid” — gave the NBA’s all-time leading scorer plenty of reason for the schadenfreude.

“LeBron’s a troll,” Gottlieb tells me over the phone after I alerted him to the post. 

“He’s just punching down. It’s just sad and petty,” he continues. “Here’s someone who has hundreds of millions of dollars living a luxurious life in L.A. tweeting about me on his off day.”

Publicity was guaranteed to follow this season regardless of how Green Bay’s season unfolded, but the kind that’s come around — like Schefter trolling Gottlieb for Green Bay’s struggles in the Horizon League, or LeBron clowning him — is putting to test the theory about all publicity being good publicity.

The characterization that Gottlieb skipped the line to get the Green Bay job or that he’s doing a disservice to his team by juggling radio or that he has detractors at all does not compute with him. And he has a list of examples — former players Steve Kerr and Fred Hoiberg among them — to back up the belief that he isn’t getting special treatment. 

Kerr and Hoiberg, of course, had significant NBA playing careers and front office experience before getting head-coaching opportunities. Gottlieb’s experience has primarily been confined to television broadcasting and radio after a short professional career that took him to Kansas, Russia, Israel and France. As far as coaching prior to Green Bay, he had only a brief stint in the 2009 Maccabiah Games — where he helped lead Team USA to gold alongside Bruce Pearl — and a run at the AAU level coaching his son.

There really is no parallel for what Gottlieb is doing, nor one for the leap straight from a media figure to head coach with his level of combined experience as a player and coach. 

He argues still that by the way he perceives things, it’s not his own credentials and worthiness as a coach at the root of people’s issues with him — but instead jealousy.

“Jealousy is really hard for people to process,” he says. “I’ve been given great — not good, great — opportunities, despite being a very good, not great, player, at a very good, not great, not connected school. So people become inherently jealous and they can’t process [it].”

Jim Sarow, a Green Bay superfan who has been watching and supporting the team since his freshman year in 1995, is more blunt in his assessment. 

“He was able to convince two employers to continue paying him big money without having to give one gig up,” Sarow said. “It’s like having two wives. People would kill for one of his jobs, and he has two.” 

Call it jealousy or call it hate or call it trolling, much of the contempt toward Gottlieb is brought on by himself, and his lack of self-awareness can be compounding. He has been a well-known media figure for decades, and in the public’s eye, a barb about a player or team or coach from years ago can stick and become personal to bystanders. 

He dishes it out but is unhappy being asked to take it. He’ll criticize Bronny James from his perch as an analyst, for instance, but act gobsmacked when LeBron keeps receipts.

There is an earnest nature in which Gottlieb strives to understand the hate and vitriol coupled with an incompatible dismissal. In one breath he’ll contemplate aloud why media types and others don’t root for him — then moments later seem impervious to those who aren’t backing him. 

Beneath it all lies the son of a former coach and hoops lifer, the late Bob Gottlieb, who is oddly wired and full of quirks. He’s a self-described night owl who sleeps terribly but insists on keeping two jobs. He has the reflexes of a radio host raring to fire back at every affront and the discipline to sometimes refrain. It’s a daily, hourly, minute-by-minute grind to prove something about himself to the outside world, to his family, and to his father who can no longer know it.

“This is an attempt at a rebirth for me,” he said. “All of this shit is really f—ing hard, but this is a chance to do something meaningful. I don’t think you can have success without being delusional in your self-confidence.”

There’s a dead walleye mounted on Gottlieb’s basement wall. It’s the first thing you see as you make your way from the main floor of his home, down the winding stairs into his man cave, which in these parts is as necessary as a warm winter coat. It came with the house.

Some boxes remain unpacked. The only personal items downstairs are a headset and a soundboard sitting on the bar, where he hosts his radio show, and a few half-empty liquor bottles scattered on the back bar. Off to the side sits a souvenir basketball from his first win as coach, with the date, his name, the opponent and final score inscribed. If he were planning to make a run for the exit after an abysmal first season, then frankly, it’d look a whole lot like it does right now. 

He says he’s not, though. And Green Bay has no plans of ejecting from the Doug Gottlieb business anytime soon, either. 

“We’re going to bring Doug back next year,” Moon tells me. “We’re going to see this thing through.”

Still, questions persist about the permanence of this project, both for Moon and for Gottlieb. Moon says he frequently hears from fed-up fans about the decision to hire a radio host as head coach — some reaching out with pseudonyms. 

“They say, ‘Oh, this is an embarrassment. How could you have a radio host as coach?'” Moon said.  

Gottlieb’s contract — he’s making $215,000 in his first year — has a conflict management plan in it to outline handling of any conflicts that may arise from the agreement he and Green Bay struck to allow him to continue his daily radio show while coaching. It hasn’t been put to use this season. But the very existence of it highlights the unusual arrangement. 

Coaches from college basketball to college football have weekly radio shows, typically spanning an hour, but doing three-hour radio shows five days a week is a timesuck. So why doesn’t he just give up the side hustle and commit to coaching?

“Maybe,” Gottlieb said. “Maybe if we get to that point. Honestly — and maybe I’m an idiot — but I think it’s going to eventually help. I have kids that we’re recruiting that love that people take shots at me. Some will even defend me saying, ‘Coach, this is bullshit what they’re saying about you. I want to come play for you.’ My guys here are defensive, too.”

Gottlieb, his players and Moon have developed a party line to reply to cynics. He has to cut out for several hours in the afternoon every day and on rare occasions will travel for radio — as he did for Super Bowl week shortly before I arrived in Green Bay — but it doesn’t affect morning practices, afternoon shootarounds or evening preparation. It’s akin, they all argue, to having hobbies; his just happen to be in a public sphere. 

Moreover, Gottlieb is divorced and his kids are in Oklahoma, so right now “there aren’t demands on being home for family,” he says. He says he uses what would be family time to pour back into his program when they aren’t around, and he says it in a way that spills out with a sense of dejection, revealing the emotional tax he’s paying of being nearly 1,000 miles away from his twin daughters, Harper and Grace, and his son, Hayes.

“That’s the hardest part,” Gottlieb said. “It sucks.”  

From the outside, it may appear as if it’s a circus act that’s come to town — Gottlieb the ringleader of some unusual experiment to win while doing things unconventionally. He says he’s fine if people believe that. But he doesn’t feel like his part is a juggling act. He’s able to coach and radio and can compartmentalize when needed. His boss agrees.

“He’s doing a pretty good job juggling all that,” Moon said. “His schedule is built in a way that he can do both, and it’s been a non-issue. Like, if we’re in the same spot a year from now, you know, I don’t know. We’ll see. But at this point it’s not been a concern, and I’ve been surprised how smooth it’s been.”

The results suggest otherwise. The Phoenix are 3-26 on the season and 1-17 in Horizon League play — they snapped that pesky losing streak at 21 the day after I left town — but you have to squint hard to find silver linings. They are 364th out of 364 teams in offensive rebounding and ranked 334th at KenPom. One year after going 18-14 under Wicks and challenging for a conference title in one of the best bounceback stories in basketball, the Phoenix are pacing toward a similar finish as 2022-23, when they went 3-29 and set a program record for fewest wins in a season. 

Worst record in first season as school’s head coach, last 10 years

It’s 9 a.m. inside the Kress Center that frigid Valentine’s Day morning, about 12 hours before Gottlieb’s car was hit by the opposing team’s bus. Dennis Harrington, the director of men’s basketball operations, walks into Gottlieb’s office — his tiny space crammed for a staff meeting before shootaround — and sets down a bottle of bone broth and three neatly-wrapped bundles of sage incense. 

“We need all the luck we can get,” he says as the team prepares to play at the Kress, where it had not won since January 2021 before beating Wright State in the building the day after I left town. “I don’t know what I did to piss off the basketball gods, but we’ve got some demons we need to get out of here.” 

Gottlieb’s plan for the sage fits his plan for the season: “tons of constant trial and error.” He’s never used it. And mostly he has questions, not answers, about how and where to use it. Are all three sticks supposed to be set ablaze at the same time? Do you light it at the entryways, or is it made to flame the entire arena? And surely, Gottlieb wonders aloud, some sort of chant should be repeated as he experiments with it. 

Right?

He walks down the hall of the offices into the gym, grabs his phone and pulls up ChatGPT.

“OK,” he says under his breath, his fingers typing as he talks out his request. “Chant … for … good luck … to .. repeat … with sage.” With a lighter in one hand and his phone in the other, he sets fire to one of the sticks of sage. 

“Let all negativity be gone forever,” he says in a droning, sober tone. It’s a dramatic shift from his bombastic delivery and over-the-top energy he brings to his daily radio show. “Bring love and happiness and protection to this house, and myself.” 

He repeats it again and again, walking from one side of the court to the other in a circle.

Junior guard Preston Ruedinger grabs a stick and follows suit, marching through the bleachers and chanting the same phrase. Some of the players look on, either bemused or disinterested, while others continue their shootaround unbothered. 

It’s hard to tell if Gottlieb is embracing a ritual or putting on a performance, as he smiles while chanting. But the entertainer in Gottlieb — the one that still has a popular national radio show every weekday for three hours — overrides the coach in him. He commits fully to the bit, and drives home the point while discussing the gameplan moments later by again mentioning the sage and his belief that better luck can help work the stench off what has turned into a nightmarish first season. 

It’s a sequence that encapsulates the can’t-take-your-eyes-off-it oddity of a polarizing broadcaster from California who has uprooted his life to coach in the Horizon League, juggling two jobs and learning on the fly. Is he serious about it all, like really serious, or is this a publicity stunt?

One of Gottlieb’s players, watching from the sidelines, says what everyone seems to be thinking: “What is happening right now?”