"Skinny beards. A bad look," he opines off-air while watching a college basketball game in an ESPN TV studio.

"Anybody ever had a bulldog?" he asks while a mascot performs during a timeout in another game. "Most gaseous dog ever, right?"

"I could go on a diatribe about the great airports of this country," he says upon deplaning in Charlotte - then does.

When he finishes work late at night and the East Coast is asleep, Gottlieb calls his father, a basketball coach for four decades, or his brother in California during the 30-minute ride home.

"Doug, my sister and myself, there is not a lot of stop in our game," says Gregg Gottlieb, an assistant basketball coach at California. "We have trouble not saying what is on our minds. The Gottliebs have opinions and say them as facts. It is part of our competitive nature. We want to win the argument."

Toiling in hoops, radio minor leagues

Named the 1995 Orange County Player of the Year out of Tustin (Calif.) High, the 6-1 Gottlieb went to Notre Dame before leaving under a cloud and winding up at Oklahoma State, where he graduated in 2000. He is still 10th on the all-time NCAA Division I assists list. He played professionally in France, Russia and Israel, in the USBL, CBA and ABA, as well as for the 2001 Los Angeles Lakers summer team.

Gottlieb, who has a business degree, began his broadcasting career in 2002 on WWLS 640-AM, "The Sports Animal," outside Oklahoma City, hosting a midday show until ESPN offered him an audition and hired him.

Initially the co-host of ESPN Radio's GameNight, Gottlieb has gradually added duties but always has been a lightning rod. He is smart and funny, his work ethic is unparalleled and his recall so acute that ESPN College GameDay host Scott Reiss and ESPN "bracketologist" Joe Lunardi refer to him as "Rain Man."

"It's like he knows the schedule of all 340 teams off the top of his head," Reiss says. "You never have to worry about asking him a question that he can't answer. He always has the answer. He knows he has the answer."

But Gottlieb can be brutal in his assessments and the list of those with bruised feelings is not small.

On College GameDay last week he said Memphis men's basketball star Joey Dorsey was "a complete idiot" for wanting to go into the stands after a last-second win at UAB when the losing fans got ugly.

North Carolina basketball fans lit up Gottlieb online after he criticized Danny Green's pregame dance routine last month.

Gottlieb is even capable of getting his radio guests riled up. Keith Law of Scouts Inc. took umbrage when Gottlieb disagreed with his take on human growth hormone in baseball.

"I am the way I am because I would watch guys (while growing up) and think, 'Why don't they just say what they are really thinking?' " Gottlieb says. "Why does everybody have to talk in code?"

Reiss says he thinks that is the appeal of Gottlieb.

"As a guy watching the show, you are going to have a reaction to Doug and that's good television," Reiss says. "You may love him, you may hate him, you may throw things at the television but you are going to sit up and take notice when he says something. If he thinks something he is going to say it, sometimes to a fault. That is part of what makes him a good watch."

ESPN producer Dan Steir, Gottlieb's boss on game telecasts, adds his man is also a good listen.

"He has a keen eye to provide access and discovery to the viewer," Steir says. "I don't think he's overly concerned or fearful of what others think. He doesn't put blinders on himself."

Equal-opportunity tormenter

Perhaps one of the best shows at ESPN is unavailable to the masses: the banter during commercial TV breaks between Gottlieb and fellow analyst Tom Brennan on College GameDay.

Gottlieb is brutally honest. Brennan, 57, the former Vermont men's basketball coach, is drop-dead funny. Both are fascinating storytellers. They bicker about everything from players to dinner reservations to the magic of cellphones.

"When we found out we were working together two years ago, he and his wife called and said, 'We would like to get together. We would like to come to New England,' and that was touching," Brennan says. "He's a wonderful husband and a wonderful father and those things count a lot for me. But I told him, 'Twenty years ago, you and me might have been rolling on the floor.' "

Gottlieb swears it is the love of the game, not an agenda, that drives him.

"Sometimes things are so obvious and you wonder why somebody doesn't say something," he says. "And every year I feel like I win over a couple of the coaches that disliked me - not because I say anything nice about them but because they realize it's the same for everybody.

"I've said the same things about my own school, my own coach, that didn't go over so well. People realize at the end of the day that my comments were fair because that is truly how I felt. There is no message, no hatred."

He tries to shrug off his own critics and the "things that get back to him" from outside and inside the building.

"Sometimes I badly strive not to come across as the know-it-all," he says. "And yet I'm in a job in which you are supposed to be a know-it-all. How do you relate what is happening without coming off as the pain-in-the-(rear) know-it-all."

His own freshman mistake

Gottlieb is willing to take the heat for that attitude and for the problems he created for himself. Type his name into an Internet search engine, and it is evident people have long memories.

Of course he is ridiculed for being a terrible free throw shooter (46%) at Oklahoma State. He takes that in stride and even uses that in his shows.

More devastating is the horrendous decision he says he made a decade ago at Notre Dame, when he ran up charges on a credit card that wasn't his.

Gottlieb offers no excuses for the episode that led to his exit from Notre Dame. He only says the silver lining is that without it happening he would have never met his wife, Angie, at Oklahoma State.

But Brennan says even the harshest critics find a reason to listen. "People really take him seriously and they respond to him. But he is absolutely fearless," Brennan says. "But you know what I find, too? People call him back; they take his calls. No matter what they say, he has got a pipeline. He's involved with everybody."

That means everybody.

After he and TV partner Bob Wischusen spent 2½ hours calling Davidson-at-UNC-Greensboro on Feb. 19, Gottlieb spent an additional 30 minutes chatting with fans, even breaking down the 1999 Auburn team for Charlotte resident and Auburn grad Tony Kouskolekas.

Five minutes later Gottlieb and Wischusen were in the Brickhouse Tavern near the Davidson (N.C.) campus engaging anyone holding an ale. At the end of the day - one of his favorite phrases - these are listeners who might be enjoying the best of Gottlieb.

He can be concise on TV, explaining the most complex situations and making them bite size for viewers. But he is his most entertaining when the clock isn't running.

Taking his leave from the Davidson crowd, Gottlieb headed back to his hotel. He had a wakeup call for 6 a.m. to take a plane to do TV for the Michigan-Minnesota game last Thursday night in Minneapolis. But he still had a couple of points to make, some inside scoop to pass along.

Fifteen minutes later, after detours into other subjects, he will return and finish his original thought.

"When I stop and think about how I begin a sentence and where I start a conversation, the only thing I can come up with is that is how I'm wired," he says. "Sometimes conversations get out of whack because you think everyone else is thinking along your thought process, and they are not."

That, too, reminds Gottlieb of just one more thing .