Editor’s Note: After more than 20 years as a television and radio broadcaster, Doug Gottlieb, a former point guard at Oklahoma State, has taken his first college coaching job as the head coach at Green Bay. Gottlieb is coaching the Phoenix while also continuing his duties as a Fox Sports Radio host. Gottlieb will be writing a recurring journal for Hoops HQ to document the 2024-25 season. This is his third installment.
It just keeps getting better. As a perpetual optimist, whenever something has gone wrong with my team or we’ve been hit with bad luck, that’s what I’ve said to my staff. And man, let me tell you… It just keeps getting better.
As you may have heard, our team has been on a losing streak and I’ve been at the center of some sports talk controversies this week. I can’t say I expected to be in a back-and-forth with an NFL insider, but hey, there have been a lot of unexpected twists during my first season at Green Bay.
Of course, it started with the Cleveland State game and all the attention that came with benching Anthony Roy. For our players, it was a new experience being a top news story. Everywhere they went, people bombarded them with questions. What do you think of Coach? What really happened? How did it go down? I’m not sure the guys were emotionally ready for all that chaos. Personally, I had a lot on my plate as well, just trying to keep our players and fans motivated. We need people in the community to continue to donate, support and believe in our process despite our struggles.
When we finally retook the court for a home game against Milwaukee, we got bullied. The next day, we had to go to Santa Barbara. Here’s where I must take a minute to explain our scheduling. As a new head coach, you don’t have complete control over who you play. I inherited many of our games, including the MTE that pitted us against Evansville, Campbell and Ohio State.
Late in the summer, I still had three games left to schedule. I was encouraged to add easy matchups, which is the approach other teams take to have a few likely wins in the mix. On December 14, we were supposed to play a doubleheader with our women’s team. They are incredible and were slated to play Creighton, so I felt weird scheduling a low Division II or Division III school for after their game.
Josh Moon, my athletic director, suggested that we start a “Home and Home” with someone on the road. Joe Pasternak is the head coach of UC Santa Barbara and we have been friends for a long time. Skye Ettin, his assistant, was my assistant in Israel and we talk all the time. Anthony Roy is from Oakland, I’m from Orange County, and I wanted to play every year in California. Northridge called, as did UC Irvine. All three are very good and UCI is close to where I grew up, but it’s far from Oakland which was not ideal for Ant. I figured a weekend in Isla Vista might be just what our team needed, so I took the game despite the fact that Joe has a very good club with two grad transfers and a center who is as good as any at the mid-major level.
Doug Gottlieb’s Diary: Inside the Decision to Bench Anthony Roy
Roy, the nation’s leading scorer, did not play against Cleveland State after missing shootaroundWe still had two more games to decide on. Jeff Nordgaard is the Phoenix legend who beat Cal on Coach Bennett’s team. His son, Dawson, is a senior at Michigan Tech. My assistant coach Jordan McCabe came into my office one day and said, “Coach, we gotta play a Division II school during Finals week. It’s ‘Kid’s Day,’ so how about Michigan Tech? Norgy wants us to play against his son. He grew up down the road. And Marcus Tomashek (their best player) is also a Green Bay kid. People will come to see them. But I gotta warn you, they are really good. I know you only want to play legit teams. They are legit.”
Josh was on board as well. “We should play Tech,” he told me. “Norgy is the best. Let’s do him a solid.” So we did it.
And then, for that last game, it was between Arizona and Drake on December 21. One assistant coach told me, “It’s Ben McCollum’s first year. I don’t think all his guys came with him and we are both recruiting the same point guard (he eventually went to another program) so they must not have enough.” My brother played at Drake and it’s close to Green Bay, which would allow our players to get home in plenty of time for Christmas. So we added Drake.
What you realize later on is that you kind of need those low-level DII or DIII games to hopefully grab a couple wins and build some confidence. Yes, we have lost our three league games, but other Horizon teams have closer to .500 records because they have played two games against far inferior teams. I didn’t put any of those games on my schedule.
So instead of playing some half-warm body after our loss to Milwaukee, we went to play Santa Barbara. The trip out there was exhausting, as travel often is at the mid-major level. We got on the bus at 8:00 a.m. CT on Thursday morning to drive to Chicago since we couldn’t get all 25 of our guys on a single flight out of Green Bay. We flew non-stop from Chicago to Los Angeles and then got stuck in rush-hour traffic. It was 8:00 p.m. PT when we finally pulled up to the hotel. That’s a 14-hour travel day.
Despite the arduous journey, we were playing well against Santa Barbara until Ant hurt his ankle. That kid has the highest pain threshold I’ve ever seen, so I knew it was significant when he asked to come out. Without him, we went from up eight to down 20, eventually losing by 17.
Afterwards, Ant was distraught that he couldn’t finish the game, but luckily he seemed to be moving fine. The team had a redeye back to Chicago that night so the guys could have the following day off. By the time Ant got to the airport, things had taken a dramatic turn for the worse. He couldn’t put any weight on his ankle and needed a wheelchair. On the bus ride from Chicago to Green Bay, he took off his sock and it was like nothing you’ve ever seen.
He underwent a series of tests on Monday and we discovered that it was a lot more serious than we initially thought. He is out indefinitely, but we’re hopeful that he will be able to return at some point this year. Of course, Ant is devastated. He and I had dinner later that evening, but before then, I saw this tweet from ESPN’s Adam Schefter…
$50 million in NIL? There’s no way. Zero chance. Sacramento State really struggles financially. Who gave that information to Schefty? I just couldn’t wrap my head around it. Eventually I fired off this tweet…
I’ll admit that I often make the mistake of not self-editing and just tweeting how I talk. But honestly, I didn’t think anything of it. I put my phone down when I got home to focus on work. Ant came over and we had a really nice dinner together. We laughed, we cried, we swapped stories. After he left, I called two of my assistant coaches and we were discussing practice when one of them said, “Doug, you see Twitter? Schefter off the top rope on you!”
I finally looked and… oh shit! It had blown up. Schefty had put our record on blast. Like I said on my radio show, I understand that my tone might have been a bit off, but the reality is that Adam Schefter is the guy for breaking news. He carries a tremendous amount of credibility. If he says that Sacramento State has $50 million in NIL, then all of these other athletic directors are left looking like they’re not doing their jobs. Sac State does not have $50 million — there’s just no reality to that at all. That’s what my tweet was about. But then it got personal and went super viral and everyone had something to say.
It’s shitty when people respond with comments like, “You should be in the film room more!” Honestly, that’s not even mildly offensive, it’s just stupid. And it’s annoying. Bill Belichick just announced that he’s still doing his podcast with the ManningCast. Nobody said, “Bill, are you going to be able to concentrate on your job?” Stop it. I’m a grown man. I live alone. I don’t call friends and B.S. with them. Instead, I talk about sports for a couple of hours a day and just like every other human being, I watch sports on TV. I just happen to be a coach. That’s my job. I had seven or eight jobs last year. I have two now.
Doug Gottlieb’s Diary: A Long Bus Ride, a Rough Night’s Sleep, a First Win
Gottlieb is in his first season coaching Green Bay. It’s been a rough but joyful ride so far.This all leads up to Michigan Tech and all of this “Nobody U” nonsense. Look, we knew the Huskies were really good. We wanted the competition. It was the first close game we’ve played all season. We already didn’t have Ant and then our point guard, Preston Ruedinger, suffered a neck injury in the second half.
Anyway, we lost by two points and this “Nobody U” thing started popping up everywhere. None of it made any sense. None. Some guy tweeted a snippet of a postgame press conference from a couple weeks ago where I was talking about how difficult our schedule is and how I need to pick some easier matchups in the future because we can lose any of our games this season. Translation: Michigan Tech is good. I need to schedule teams not as good as Michigan Tech. Anybody who watches the full video and has a brain cell can decipher that. The idea that I would say anything negative about Tech is B.S.
I’m competitive as hell, but I’m a gracious winner and a gracious loser. This is so the opposite of who I am, what I’m about and how I carry myself. It’s literally trolling. There’s enough ammo out there on me — you don’t need to make stuff up. Sadly, despite the false narrative, this story has been aggregated all over the internet.
After all the piling on, our reward now is a matchup with Drake, one of the few remaining undefeated teams in Division I. Talk about good scheduling!
It has been quite a week, but this is how first years go. We have been hit with a ton of adversity, but you learn more from adversity than you do from success. This is a great way to find out who’s really in the foxhole with you. I have said it before and I’ll say it again: I want to build something special and Green Bay is the perfect place to do it. We just have to keep pushing.
