Doug Gottlieb has for years talked about his desire to be a Division I college basketball coach while performing his day job as a national sports talk radio host. Now he will have the opportunity to do both.
Field of 68 co-founder Jeff Goodman reported that Wisconsin Green Bay is set to hire the longtime college basketball analyst as its next head coach. And, amazingly, he will continue hosting his daily radio show.
This was the second consecutive year that Gottlieb was in contention for the Wisconsin Green Bay job. During the last coaching search, Gottlieb was never formally offered the post. Instead, that job went to former Wyoming assistant Sundance Wicks, who recently left UWGB to return to Laramie and take the head coaching vacancy there.
Gottlieb has been in the mix for college jobs before, notably interviewing for the coaching vacancy at his alma mater, Oklahoma State, in 2017, one day after he was introduced at Fox Sports. Gottlieb discussed the Wisconsin-Green Bay interview process last year, a process he detailed on his All Ball podcast.
Interestingly, Gottlieb said that one of the reasons he was not the Green Bay coach last year was because he would not give up his daily radio gig. He reasoned that the radio show would be a “great promotion” to what he would do in leading a program.
“But one of the parts to the job that I’m sure at the end of the day it became a little bit of an issue was I wouldn’t give up the radio. The radio piece, to me, is a great promotion to what I’m doing as a coach. It is in the middle of your day. You have to have a great staff. And I was prepared to take less money than other coaches would — probably than Sundance took — only in that I was going to use that money for a higher-level staff. So, that in my three-hour recording window, I was able to do my pod and do my radio show and not have to worry about what was going on.”
Gottlieb has worked for several networks as an analyst and radio host since being hired by ESPN Radio in 2003. We’ve never seen a Division I coach in any sport simultaneously be a national sports talk radio host, so the possibilities are endless, whether it puts Green Bay on the map in basketball or it all goes spectacularly wrong. However it turns out, the content created will be unlike anything we’ve ever seen before.
[Jeff Goodman on X]