Doug Gottlieb’s public crashout over KenPom didn’t come out of nowhere. It wasn’t just about Green Bay’s ranking, or buy games, or injuries, or context. This has been simmering for a while I suspect.
And if you’re looking for the spark, you don’t have to look much further than something Ken Pomeroy wrote a little over a year ago.
“I readily acknowledge the goofball that is Gottlieb.”
That wasn’t a tweet. It wasn’t a hot take. It was the opening paragraph of a long, measured article that actually defended Gottlieb’s first season as a head coach — while also cataloging, in brutal but factual terms, why Gottlieb has always been a lightning rod.
Two-time transfer who criticized transfers.
Opponent of player pay despite past credit card fraud.
A constant critic of the current generation.
A media personality coaching a D-I program while hosting a national radio show, knowing he would criticize anyone else doing so.
Pomeroy didn’t bury him. If anything, he bent over backwards to explain why Gottlieb deserved patience given the late hire, roster constraints, and expectations. But that opening salvo mattered. Gottlieb probably noticed it. And it’s hard to believe it didn’t land on an already crowded mental bulletin board.
Fast forward to now, and Gottlieb isn’t defending his program anymore. He’s attacking the system that evaluates it.
That’s the mistake.
You Can Dislike Analytics — You Can’t Ignore Them
There’s nothing wrong with a coach privately disliking KenPom, NET, or any other ranking system. Plenty of coaches do. Some even have voiced critiques.
What you cannot do — especially as a struggling low-major coach — is publicly call one of the most widely accepted evaluation model in the sport “bulls***” and expect that to help you in any meaningful way.
Because whether Gottlieb likes it or not, analytics aren’t optional even for a place like Green Bay and their goals.
If Green Bay ever wants:
- an NIT bid,
- a better NCAA seed,
- or to avoid the 16-seed play-in game as an auto-bid,
they will need a usable NET profile. Period. It’s basically the same as Kenpoms system, and you’ll need to rank at a certain level in both.
In 2026, that means roughly top 150 just to get into the NIT conversation. Two years ago it was top 85 roughly before the Crown came to kill it, so it’s important. There is no moral exemption for “context.” There is no appeal process for vibes.
This is the game. Playing it is part of the job. The job isn’t to tinker endlessly with rotations or sacrifice possessions in the name of development — especially with players who might not even be in the program next year. The job is to win games cleanly and efficiently.
KenPom doesn’t even reward “running up the score.” Margin of victory is capped, so there’s virtually no difference between winning by 20 or 40. You can’t game the system that way. But you also don’t get a free pass for sloppy play, poor shot selection, or experimental lineups that hurt your efficiency.
Every team deals with injuries, short rotations, and roster turnover. The analytics don’t ignore that reality — they record the outcomes. If a coach chooses to prioritize development over results, that’s his decision. The numbers will reflect it either way because these are the results as they should.
The Buy Game Excuse Doesn’t Work
Gottlieb’s most common complaint — that other teams inflate their numbers with buy games — is not just wrong, it fundamentally misunderstands why KenPom or the NCAA Evaluation Tool exists.
They were built to normalize disparate schedules.
That’s the entire point.
If buy games were some cheat code, every team would exploit it successfully. Instead, teams still get buried every year because:
- they lose badly,
- they lose often, or
- they lose to bad teams.
Green Bay checks all three boxes.
You’re not “faking” anything by scheduling buy games even if you win there is a ceiling. The model adjusts for opponent strength, location, and margin. That’s not a flaw — that’s the design. Hell he goes after Miami Oh as a Kenpom faker when they are in the AP top 25 at 23rd this week and KenPom has them ranked 89th. They are much lower in NET too. So his point doesn’t even make sense. Miami Oh is a faker by the metrics but he voters and their eye test has them 66 spots lower.
“Context” Is Already Accounted For — Through Results
Yes, Green Bay had injuries.
Yes, rotations changed.
Yes, teams evolve over the season.
So does basically everyone else.
Analytics don’t ignore that reality — they absorb it through outcomes. The results are the context. You don’t get partial credit because your team looked different that night or felt closer internally than the scoreboard suggested.
That’s not cruelty. That’s math.
And when a coach publicly argues that the math is unfair because it doesn’t match his internal explanation, he’s not exposing a flaw in the model. He’s exposing a misunderstanding of how evaluation works at scale and outing himself as not understanding.
This Is Bigger Than KenPom
The irony here is that Pomeroy himself once went out of his way to defend Gottlieb, explicitly arguing that a bad first season — especially under unique circumstances — shouldn’t doom a coach’s future.
That olive branch seems to have been forgotten.
Instead, Gottlieb has chosen to fight the messenger, attack the measurement, and frame himself as a victim of analytics rather than a participant in them.
The people who seed tournaments, award bids, and evaluate programs are not turning NET or KenPom off because Doug Gottlieb is mad at it.
The Bottom Line
You can hate KenPom.
You can critique NET inputs.
You can argue nuance behind closed doors.
But publicly calling the system “bulls***” while simultaneously needing it to ever succeed?
That’s not principled.
That’s not strategic.
That’s not smart.
It’s just a coach telling the world — unintentionally but unmistakably — that he doesn’t understand the math that governs modern college basketball.
And in 2026, that’s not an edge.
It’s a liability.
