Doug Gottlieb (2:23)
This is the Best of the Herd with college on Fox Sports Radio. Boom. What up America? Doug Gottlieb in for Colin this is the Herd. Wherever you may be and however you may be making this part of your day. Thanks so much. I'm Doug Gottlieb and we can all get together and we're getting ready for the NCAA tournament. It's a weird one for me. Some of you may know I'm actually a head basketball coach at Green B. What you may not know is this is the first NCAA tournament in 23 years that I'm not covering for. I was ESPN for nine, I was worked there for 10, but nine covering the tournament and then CBS for five. And then since then, the last seven years it was Fox, but, but also Westwood One. You know, I was at CBS, Selection Sunday, Final Four, etc. And calling games the first weekend. And you know, I've been with Westwood One as their studio host and going all the way to the Final Four. And now I ain't got nothing to do except talk to you. So I'm going to bore the hell out. No, I'm kidding. We're going to break down your brackets and tell you about the 12,5 upsets. And you know, I got a, I got a, I got to. You listen, if you subscribe to my service, okay, you subscribe to my service. Listen, I got, I got four gold locked picks, okay? Gold lock picks. No, I just, it's interesting. And you know, I, I, as a kid I watched it. My dad got me out of school, right? Whether it was Jordan Elementary, Lada elementary. Wait, there's more. McPherson Middle School, Junior High School, Santiago Middle School, Yoruba Middle School. That's right, three middle schools. And then Tustin High School. My dad would come get me out of school and we'd go down to, we go down to a sports bar in Costa Mesa and watch all the games. I think one time we went to Silky Sullivan's. That was in Fountain Valley. Don't know if that still exists. Anyway, from there I and I, we would go to the Final Four. And then even when I played at Notre Dame and we were bad my first year, we still went to the Final Four. That was at, in East Rutherford, New Jersey, my year at Golden West College where I didn't play, where I technically red shirted. I watched my childhood best friend Miles Simon win a national championship in Indianapolis and then played in it three times at Oklahoma State and then covered it, really, after I got done playing overseas. United two years. Where was overseas during the tournament. Actually three when I was overseas during the tournament. And since then I've been back in and I will tell you, more motivated than ever to have the full circle, right? Watched it, loved it, played in it, covered it. TV and radio on the floor. The Final Four in the national championship game. And now I want to coach in it, but I can't. We weren't good enough and we got to build it and build it right. So you're stuck with me. But what I do think is fascinating is how, how much has changed in the landscape of the sport. Some of it still remains the same. There's still the Cinderella stories. And when we think of stories of our past, it's interesting. There's some of the greatest games or potential upsets or whatever weren't actually upsets, didn't actually happen. Like Princeton, Georgetown, Georgetown still won the game. Georgetown won the game. And then of course we started to see more and more upsets throughout our childhood into our adulthood. And what I thought would never happen, I truly believed in covering it. You would never see a 16 beat a 1. And the logic behind it was this. When they started the field of 64, there were like, I don't think there were 200 Division 1 teams. Now there are 364. 364. So if the top are the top four and they used to be competing against 200, 225, 230 and now they're competing against 300, one would think the disparity was even greater. But as luck would have it, an injury happened with DeAndre Hunter at Virginia and an upset of all upsets took place with umbc. And then I thought, well, we'll never have that again, only to have it happen again. But amateurism is gone. I don't want to call this professional basketball because though I get paid a salary to coach my team, to run my program, to make sure my kids go to class, you know, graduate, are academically ineligible, stay out of trouble, run practice, manage a whole basketball program. And look, college basketball players do receive compensation above that of a scholarship, above that of a grant aid. Let's kid, let's not kid ourselves. This is not professional. Right. If it was professional, you wouldn't believe the stories that take place don't happen in a professional world. You also don't get a chance to just leave one job with a contract and not have a buyout and not have a non compete clause going from job to job to job to job to job. So it's a mix of what we used to have mix in education which does get pushed to the wayside by so many people. And then you kind of morph professional basketball and AAU basketball and there you go. But here's what I wish would happen. It's not going to happen. But like Wofford takes on Tennessee, Wofford takes on Tennessee. And there's some unique things that college basketball people know that I'm going to teach you here before the games. Tip off. Um, I had a college basketball coach before I took the job. Tell me, like, hey, ever notice handshake lines are a lot longer than they used to be? Well, what's that mean? Well, you know when Omaha takes on St. John's and Omaha's best player goes for 25 and 10 and they lose and he shakes hands with Rick Pitino or one of the assistant coaches, they go, is that your mom over there? Hey, hey, hey, hey, mom, how are you? How are you? Right. It doesn't mean there's poaching actually taking place, but it doesn't mean that it's not taking place. Right. Like literally mid major teams playing against high major teams. It's an active tryout. I kid you not. But what I'd love to have happen is when Wofford takes on Tennessee, them to flash up the sum total of the salaries of the players of each team. That would be amazing. Tennessee's coach by Rick Barnes. He's a friend. I think Rick's a, Rick's a great dude. We were rivals. He coached at Texas when I was in college and I had heard he was a great dude. And he's even better than that. I do expect them to win this game. And Wofford has a big guy who shoots the ball underhanded, which if you watch me play in college, people did encourage me to try. So I'm always fascinated by it. But what I would love is if it comes down the stretch and they're under four minutes and say Spiro Adidas is calling, calling the game. Tennessee with a $4.2 million payroll. Take it on. Wofford with $135,000 payroll. It would make you it. You want to talk about David and Goliath, that's what you have. It's like equal punishments, right? If you're bad, it's hard to raise money to get players to get good. And even on bad teams, guys that go and put up their numbers, well, they go and they want to go somewhere else and fool somebody else and go get and go get paid. And if you're good at the mid major level, you're going to lose all your players because people are like, man, they're good, let's take them. That's how it actually works. Nonetheless, we still have a bracket and now the actual bracket games begin. But I do think that, and I said this on my show And I said it just so you know, I'm, I believe in congruent arguments. I thought the mistake of the College Football Playoff committee was, was balanced out by the NCAA basketball committee. What do I mean by that? It doesn't mean that every team that spent money is better than teams that don't spend money. Doesn't mean that. But the SEC has spent a whole hell of a lot more money than everybody else. And it's not just with the players, with the facilities, with the support staff, with the head coaches. It's all of it. All of it. And so it's not just about your specific team, but their path to success and their path to a record. Right. The flaw in the argument for smu, which spent a bunch of money to get into the ACC and then to field their team, or Indiana, that spent a ton of money and had a soft schedule but beat up on the Big Ten is not to say, hey, well, we spent money and look, you know, we got this huge payroll. You know, Indiana, what was like a $15 million payroll, which was a big, big amount. The difference is in the sec, in both football and basketball, every team you play, every team you play in basketball has a 2 to 4 or 5 million dollar payroll. Whereas when you're in the ACC, for example, they have teams with 3 and 4 million dollar payrolls, but they have teams that are about a million. And there is a, there's just a difference. And when you have, when you have a payroll that's a million dollars or whatever and you go all in on one or two players and all of a sudden one of those guys gets hurt or one of those guys isn't as good as the billing or maybe hasn't been able to level up to the acc. Now all of a sudden you don't have the depth to contend on a daily basis in your conference, even though you're better than most of the other teams because again, you have a million dollar payroll. Am I making sense? So I, look, I, I still love the tournament. I grew up watching it. I can quote chapter and verse all of the different upsets. The moment that changed my existence as a basketball player wanting to do it happened about 30 minutes where I'm broadcasting from him. Doug Gottlieb in for Colin. This I heard on Fox Sports radio and the iHeartradio app. We're broadcasting from Sherman Oaks, California at Long Beach arena where my dad for three years was an assistant coach under the great Tex winner at Long beach arena in. Was it 1990? It was 1990. Might have been 91. The first game after Hank Gathers had passed away, Loyal Amermont took on New Mexico State. And I'll never forget it. You know, I'd watch the semifinals when Hank went down. I had known both of those guys from the pump basketball camp where I was a cat, I was a camper. And those guys played pickleball at Cal, at csun, Cal State Northridge, where we stayed at night. And they were godlike figures. And when Hank died, just, it was soul crushing to somebody who idolized him and thought, I mean, he looked like a Greek God. I watched them play and they came out in, in their. And everything was adorned in maroon uniforms with 44s everywhere. And when I saw Bo Kimble dribble three times with his right hand and switch it and shoot to his left hand to copy his fallen friend and teammate who kind of like the kid from Wofford, switched to shooting free throws left handed because he was so bad at shooting them right handed. And then he made the free throw and there wasn't a dry eye in the place. I was like, this is what I want to do. I want to play in it, I want to cover it, I want to coach it. So that emotion still exists. But let's not kid ourselves. We're in a weird place where like literally Tennessee has 40. I would, I would, I would guess at minimum 30 times greater salaries than that of Wofford tonight. 30 times. I'll check my math during the break. That's what I'll do. But I think I got that right. I may have over exaggerated, but I think I got it right. If you're somewhere like $4 million and they're somewhere in the, you know, 150 to 200, what is that ratio? You guys work that out. Coming up next in the Herd, John Fanta is going to join us. If you love college basketball, John is everywhere. He does play by play, he does reporting, he does sideline. The madness is about to tip off. I'm going to ask him what's one upset he sees happening today. That's next. I'm Doug Gottlieb. This is the Herd. Be sure to catch live editions of the Herd, Weekdays at noon Eastern, 9am Pacific on Fox Sports Radio, FS1 and.
