It was mid-November, and Doug Gottlieb and the Green Bay Phoenix were already at a crossroads. They sat at 1-3 to begin the 2025-26 campaign, coming off a discouraging 80-61 loss to St. Thomas and heading for a brutal stretch of nonconference games. The situation felt precarious, even with so much season ahead of them. Could it really all unravel again?
The 2024-25 campaign — Gottlieb’s first at the helm — had taken a significant toll on everyone inside the program. Green Bay had been under the microscope from the moment it hired Gottlieb, a longtime media personality who maintained his role as a radio host for FOX Sports upon assuming the job. With the Phoenix in the spotlight, they had the year from hell, marked by injuries, controversy, relentless outside scrutiny and many, many losses. From late November to mid-February, they suffered 21 straight defeats, eventually finishing 4-28.
Two weeks into a new season, it was clear to Gottlieb that there were still some lingering effects from all that turmoil. So he gathered the team while in Minnesota for a game against the Golden Gophers to deliver a stern message. “I said, ‘This is not last year. This is a new team,’” Gottlieb tells Hoops HQ. “‘The guys who are back have PTSD from losing 21 in a row, and the guys who are new don’t understand how much this means to all of us and how badly we want to shut everybody the f*** up. You can’t become complacent with losing. Losing can’t be okay.’” Gottlieb urged his players to let the past go, stop putting pressure on themselves and start playing with confidence.
“When Coach said that, it honestly flipped the season,” says 6-foot-2 senior guard Preston Ruedinger.
That night at The Barn, Green Bay — a 25.5-point underdog — took Minnesota to overtime, nearly pulling off one of the most stunning upsets of the season. The Phoenix have gone 14-8 since, including impressive victories over UMass, Iona and UC Santa Barbara. On Thursday, they dominated Purdue Fort Wayne 76-59 for their third straight win. At 10-6 in league play, they are just 1.5 games out of first place in the Horizon.
Gottlieb’s message that day in Minnesota has proven true. This is not last year.
A lot has changed for Green Bay in Year Two of the Gottlieb era. The staff has been revamped, ten new players have entered the mix and Gottlieb has tweaked his personal approach, even opting to step away from his radio show. While there was external pressure to succeed right away — given Gottlieb’s celebrity and the perception that he wasn’t all-in on the job due to his media obligations — Gottlieb understands that it takes time to build a strong program. This season, the team has made meaningful strides in that direction, adjusting based on last season’s failures. “Every year you learn, you process and you try to move forward,” Gottlieb says.
To that end, Gottlieb did a thorough evaluation of his program during the 2025 offseason, relying on friends and mentors for advice. His first priority was to retain several key pieces. “We had to bring back continuity,” Gottlieb explains. “It’s too expensive to go out and build a whole new team. And even if you can afford it, you spend most of the year trying to figure out who your group is.” Green Bay re-signed six players, four of whom are currently in the starting lineup. Ruedinger, who’s in his third season with the Phoenix, is the unquestioned leader, and the team’s top two scorers are also returnees: 6-foot-4 sophomore guard C.J. O’Hara (14.1 points per game) and 6-foot-6 junior forward Marcus Hall (13.8 points per game).
Gottlieb had a clear strategy to fill the remaining roster spots. In the transfer portal, he focused on three groups: JUCO players, high-level Division II and Division III players, and players originally from Wisconsin who might be interested in coming home. He hit on several of his top targets, including 6-foot-4 senior guard Justin Allen, a former DIII star at Carnegie Mellon who’s averaging 12.1 points this year.
In addition to restructuring his roster, Gottlieb also overhauled his staff, hiring three new assistants: Kerry Rupp, a veteran of the business who was the head coach at Louisiana Tech from 2007-11 and most recently served as an assistant at Detroit Mercy; Keil Ganz, a Green Bay alum who came over from Northern Michigan, where he was the associate head coach; and Andy Ground, who was Gottlieb’s head coach at Tustin High School in the 1990s and has also worked at the JUCO and collegiate levels.
Beyond structural changes, Gottlieb reviewed and revised his own approach to the job, both on and off the court. He conducted a study of what it takes to win at the Division I level, researching all of the country’s top programs. What he found was that the three major factors separating the great teams from the rest were turnover percentage, rebounding percentage and defensive efficiency. Thus, Green Bay has had the same keys to every game this season: value the ball, rebound the ball and guard the ball. “Defense has really been our biggest focal point this year,” Hall tells Hoops HQ. “Some games we’ve had lapses, but for the most part our defense has improved a lot since last year. Everyone has bought into (the fact that) if you want to play, you have to play defense at a high level.”
Gottlieb has also evolved as a leader. He credits some of his growth to better managing his ADHD, which he says went undiagnosed and untreated for years. It’s also just the product of having a year at Green Bay under his belt. As he has gotten a better feel for his new career, his confidence has risen and his communication skills have improved.
In a diary he wrote for Hoops HQ back in May, Gottlieb vowed to share less about his team during press conferences in 2025-26. He has kept his word. That’s why there have been fewer of his interview clips floating around social media, save for that rant about KenPom that went viral a few weeks ago. The biggest headlines he made off the court was in mid-December when he announced that he would be taking a break from his radio show.
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The wheels started turning on that decision when Green Bay visited the U.S. Virgin Islands in late November for a Thanksgiving tournament. Due to travel complications and coaching responsibilities, Gottlieb was unable to do his show that week. The Phoenix went 2-1 in the event, knocking off UMass and Iona and nearly beating Yale, which sits atop the Ivy League. Gottlieb relished being “completely about ball” and having more free time than usual. “I’ve had several moments of clarity where I’m like, this is what I want to do,” Gottlieb says about coaching.
Most people don’t know that Gottlieb was actually prepared to give up radio for coaching a few years ago. It was the summer of 2023 and then-Oklahoma State coach Mike Boynton was planning to hire Gottlieb as an assistant, but the OSU athletic department wanted him to drop the radio gig. After wrestling with the decision, Gottlieb concluded that he would go for it, in large part because he thinks so highly of Boynton.
Gottlieb was on his way to the airport to fly from Los Angeles to Oklahoma City when Boynton called. As a close friend, Boynton felt bad about the amount that Gottlieb would be sacrificing to join the Pokes. “He didn’t like the idea of me giving up my entire life to come work for him when we had never worked together before,” Gottlieb explains. “I think that would have been a lot of pressure on Mike and my relationship with him to make it work. So he was like, ‘Look, I’ll do anything to have you here, but I can’t have you give up your radio.’” So rather than taking the assistant job, Gottlieb accepted a consulting position that allowed him to remain in California and continue doing media. A year later, Boynton was dismissed from Oklahoma State and Gottlieb landed the job at Green Bay.
With more stability in his current role, Gottlieb felt comfortable making the leap he nearly did in 2023. From the perspective of his players, nothing has changed since he walked away from radio. “Contrary to popular belief, for us internally, it doesn’t really make any difference,” Hall says. “People thought (radio) pulled his focus away from coaching, but he’s always been 100 percent locked in on coaching and trying to get us better and preparing for every game.”
“Everyone talks about the show like it’s some bad thing, but that’s two hours of the day,” adds Ruedinger. “To be honest, with any other coach, you’re not seeing them 12 hours a day. They have their stuff going on, too. So on a day-to-day basis, there’s no difference.”
The only noticeable change has been that Gottlieb is now always able to travel with the team, whereas last year he sometimes had to go separately because of radio duties. On a personal level, Gottlieb has enjoyed more downtime and the ability to home in on every little detail associated with running his program. “It just gives me a life,” he says. “I go to at least two high school games a week. I have dinner with donors at least twice a week. I get time to just sit at home and really develop my thoughts on what I want, program-wise.”
As he reflects on the jump that Green Bay has made this season, Gottlieb thinks back to a conversation he had with then-Drake, now-Iowa coach Ben McCollum a year ago. It was right after Drake had toppled the Phoenix, 72-62, at the Knapp Center on Dec. 21, 2024. McCollum, a four-time DII national champion at Northwest Missouri State who was on his way to winning Missouri Valley Coach of the Year, grabbed Gottlieb and said, “Hey, nobody remembers my first two years. We were awful. I’ve watched every game and you’re getting better. Just keep getting better.”
One of the most celebrated coaches in the sport, McCollum has accumulated a remarkable 444-100 record over the past 17 years, but his journey began with two losing seasons.
The message was a reminder to never lose sight of the big picture, and it has stuck with Gottlieb ever since. “You just have to keep learning,” he says. Learning, processing and moving forward.
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