Doug Gottlieb Thinks He Can Coach

Oh, wow, where do we even begin here? You all are familiar with Doug Gottlieb, right? He's basically the Craig James of college basketball. Or maybe a better description is, he's Colin Cowherd without the racism and misogyny. He called USF a commuter school on Twitter after the Bulls lost to Notre Dame in the Big East tournament, and then deleted the tweet, and then kept insisting USF did not belong in the NCAAs even after they had been invited to the dance. Also, stolen credit cards, Notre Dame, etc. Yeah, that Doug Gottlieb.

Anyway, Gottlieb, who has no high school or college basketball coaching experience (although he was an assistant coach for Team USA in the 2009 Maccabiah Games), has decided that the perfect person to replace Frank Martin at Kansas State is... Doug Gottlieb! And from what I'm reading in this tout job in USA Today, he thinks it would work on the grounds that hiring Martin was a successful risk because he had no college head coaching experience, so why couldn't he do the same thing.

Let's see... maybe because Frank Martin coached some kickass high school teams in Miami and was one of Bob Huggins's assistants for three years and can recruit like a mother, and Gottlieb hasn't ever done any of those things? And also because people in his industry actually like Martin, while Gottlieb spends his days on the radio trolling Jim Boeheim and countless other people? Do those count as reasons why not? But here he is, basically telling 300-some college basketball coaches in Division I that he thinks their job is easy enough that he can hang up his headphones and walk right in and succeed in the Big XII. And what's more, that he can do it 50 miles away from one of the blue-bloods of college basketball, and keep a program afloat that hasn't done this well since the 1980s.

Oh, and Gottlieb thinks he can get some of his coach friends who are looking for assistant jobs to carry him through when he doesn't know how to draw up a play coming out of a timeout, or how to recruit, or how to deal with a million other things that college coaches have to deal with that he would never, ever know about. (HINT: THIS MEANS HE WOULD HIRE BRUCE PEARL. CHECK THAT MACCABIAH GAMES LINK.)

(Update: Andrew reminded me that Bruce Pearl was hit with a show-cause penalty that runs until 2014. Although would that really stop Gottlieb from trying to hire him?)

I don't know, maybe Gottlieb should give SMU a try. Steve Orsini hired George O'Leary when he was the AD at UCF, so he has experience with publicity-stunt hires. Also then Gottlieb would have to visit Tampa every year or two, which would be a lot of fun. For us. But I have to think even Orsini is smart enough to know that Gottlieb might be the kind of coach that ultimately gets an athletic director fired.