The fascinating hire of Doug Gottlieb

Coaches are crazy. How does a debutante with a side hustle hope to compete?

The most surprising piece of the most fascinating college hoops hire in recent memory almost felt tacked on, a throwaway line at the end of a tweet.

Several reporters had broken the news that UW-Green Bay would hire Doug Gottlieb, the former player and longtime hoops analyst and radio show host, to be the Phoenix's next head coach. This was not totally a shock: Green Bay had lost its first-year head coach Sundance Weeks extremely late in the cycle; Weeks had taken the job at Wyoming after Cowboys coach Jeff Linder went to Texas Tech to be a top assistant under Grant McCasland. Green Bay needed to find someone, and when schools are hiring coaches in late April or May, they cast a wider, riskier, more interesting net.

Gottlieb, for his part, had never hid his desire to get into coaching. He had put himself forward as a viable candidate at his alma mater Oklahoma State at least twice before despite his lack of formal experience. It is not unheard of for smart broadcasters to become good coaches — Steve Kerr is a timeless example — and even if OSU understandably didn't want to take the risk it was surely only a matter of time until another athletic director did.

So the news itself — low-ish-mid-major program takes a swing on Doug Gottlieb — was not the surprise.

This was the surprise:

That's what makes Gottlieb's hire so remarkable: He is going to attempt to do a job that college coaches now routinely lament has having never been so difficult, time-consuming, and soul-evaporating ... while also showing up every day for his two-hour radio show with all of the time and prep and media consumption it entails.

There has never been a college basketball arrangement quite like this. This is not the same as saying it can't work.