Green Bay hoops coach/radio personality Gottlieb eyes return to Allen Fieldhouse
AI-generated summary reviewed by our newsroom.
- Three quick takeaways: Gottlieb schedules high-profile nonconference tests.
- He uses marquee games to develop players, citing Kansas as a teaching site.
- Green Bay overscheduled tough opponents, aims to build toughness and resume.
Back in 2016, 40-year-old college basketball analyst/talk-show personality Doug Gottlieb served as a guest coach at Bill Self’s fantasy ProCamp with fellow celebrities Jay Williams, Miles Simon and Fran Fraschilla.
At the time, nobody knew the two-time single-season NCAA assists leader out of Oklahoma State would follow in his dad Bob’s footsteps and one day actually become a college head coach.
Now 49, Gottlieb on Monday night will bring his second Green Bay Phoenix team to tradition-rich Allen Fieldhouse for a 7 p.m. tipoff in the regular-season opener for both teams.
The game will mean much more than the fantasy-experience contests in Allen Fieldhouse — games between players ages 35 and up.
“Doug’s always been a high basketball IQ guy back when he played, and certainly commentating on everybody else playing as a media member, and now seeing him as a coach and still somewhat of a media member … I think it’s a unique situation, but he’s a very knowledgeable guy.” 23rd-year KU coach Self said Friday.
Gottlieb — his first Green Bay team struggled mightily at 4-28 — has continued to host a national radio talk show, “The Doug Gottlieb Show,” on Fox Sports radio in addition to carrying out his coaching duties.
He did not contact fellow Oklahoma State graduate Self about playing a game in Lawrence to spark discussion on his talk show. He did so for his players.
“My thing was, I want to be a player-led program,” Gottlieb said recently at the Horizon League’s hoops media day. “I asked (junior guard) Marcus Hall last year about this time, ‘Hey, if you (could) play one team who would it be?’ He was like, ‘Coach, I always wanted to play Kansas.’ All right, done. So coach Self is an Oklahoma State alum. We’re good friends. So that’ll be great, because I love this league,” Gottlieb added of a marquee game between teams from the Horizon League and Big 12.
Earlier, Gottlieb also said to the Green Bay Post-Gazette: “We open the season Nov. 3 at Allen Fieldhouse and take on the Kansas Jayhawks. I guess I’m just too dumb. I always wanted to coach a game there, so what the heck. That actually comes from asking the players, ‘Hey, guys, if there is one place you could play on Earth, where would it be?’ They are like, ‘What about Kansas?’
“I called up coach Self about six months ago, and at some point, he texted me, ‘Let’s play.’’’
Self said: “If I remember, right I think he just called when he got the job at Green Bay, saying that he would really like to play here if, if we could work it out. And so, of course, that was pretty easy. So yes, it timed up well for both of us to do the opening game.”
The Phoenix’s nonconference schedule includes road games versus KU, Buffalo and Minnesota plus an appearance in the 2025 Paradise Jam in the Virgin Islands. Green Bay will play Yale in the first round and either UMass or Charleston in round two. A third game will be against Oregon State, Iona, Akron or Evansville.
“You go to some of these places, and it doesn’t feel like college basketball,” Gottlieb said of playing at Allen Fieldhouse. “So I want those guys to feel like, ‘This is what it’s really like. This is what you’re really competing against. This is what it’s supposed to be.’
“And then we go to Buffalo. We come home and then we go to St Thomas, who’s picked to win the Summit League. We go to Minnesota — that’s going to be a bear — and play in the barn (Williams Arena in Minneapolis). Yale was picked to win the Ivy League. We play Santa Barbara (in Green Bay), who is picked to win the Big West. So we overscheduled again. Chalk it up for a young coach. We’ll change that some next year, but we think that we have the toughness, the competitiveness and the character to get through it, and we’ve got some pretty good ball players,” Gottlieb added.
Gottlieb actually can tell his players what it’s like to compete in a game as a visitor at Allen Fieldhouse. In 1999, he wore his shorts backwards for the first eight minutes of an Oklahoma State loss to the Jayhawks. Then-OSU coach Eddie Sutton, in response to fans chanting “shorts on backwards,” had to call a timeout — in which Gottlieb, surrounded by his teammates, corrected the wardrobe malfunction by removing his shorts and putting them on the right way.
This year’s Phoenix team is led by Hall, a 6-6 junior from Schofield, Wisconsin, who averaged 13.9 points and 4.2 rebounds per game a year ago. He hit 36.7% of his 3-point attempts.
The team’s leading scorer from a year ago, Anthony Roy (25.7 ppg), has transferred to Oklahoma State. Hall is joined by 6-2 senior guard Preston Ruedinger (8.0 ppg), 6-5 sophomore guard Mac Wrecke (6.1 ppg) and 6-4 sophomore guard C.J. O’Hara (4.0 ppg). Ramel Bethea, a 6-9, 29-year-old sophomore who averaged 12.7 points and 9.7 rebounds a game last season at MiraCosta College, is a newcomer to the program.
“We’re carrying the momentum of ‘we’re good enough,’ even though the record didn’t say as much last year,” Ruedinger told midmajormadness.com.
After the Green Bay game, the Jayhawks will begin preparation for Friday’s game at North Carolina (6 p.m. Central Time at the Dean E. Smith Center).
