John Robinson, the affable head coach who guided the University of Southern California football team to four Rose Bowl victories and one national championship and took the Los Angeles Rams to the brink of two Super Bowls, died on Monday in Baton Rouge, La. He was 89.
U.S.C. said the cause was complications of pneumonia.
Robinson had a reputation as a players’ coach who didn’t take himself seriously in his 27 years leading the U.S.C. Trojans, the Rams and the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, Rebels.
Jim Murray, a sports columnist for The Los Angeles Times, described Robinson as nothing like old school coaches who were remote or whose ill-temper put the fear of God in players.
“Football coaches tend to be Machiavellian in character,” Murray wrote in 1982, “but Robinson was more like a country doctor healing the sick in exchange for fresh eggs.”
Vince Newsome, a Rams safety, told The New York Times in 1988: “The one thing about him that has never changed is he can motivate anybody, even when you don’t understand how he’s doing it. He’s blessed with being able to talk to a guy from his own experience. He can pick you up out of your own personal funk.”
In the first of his two stints as coach of the Trojans, Robinson succeeded John McKay in 1976 and won the Rose Bowl after that regular season, as he did again after the 1978 and 1979 seasons.
In 1978, U.S.C. was voted the No. 1 team in the final United Press International coaches poll after compiling a 12-1 record. U.S.C. shared the national title with Alabama, which was voted No. 1 in The Associated Press poll.
Two of Robinson’s players won the Heisman Trophy, the running backs Marcus Allen in 1979 and Charles White in 1981.
Robinson twice ran into trouble with governing bodies. First, the Pac-10 conference banned U.S.C. from playing in a bowl game after the 1980 season for N.C.A.A. violations, including the enrollment of more than 30 players in classes for which they received credit but didn’t attend.
In 1982, the N.C.A.A. barred the Trojans from bowl games and from appearing on television for two years because of violations, including the scalping of players’ complimentary game tickets by an assistant coach.
“We feel like the penalties we’re receiving are way out of line for any pattern that’s gone on before with the N.C.A.A.,” Robinson told U.P.I. in 1982. “I feel the N.C.A.A. has changed their behavior, and we’re quite angry about it.”
Near the end of the 1982 season, he announced that he would resign to take a new job as U.S.C.’s senior vice president of university relations. When asked what he would say to motivate his players before his final game, against Notre Dame, Robinson said, “I think it will be a ‘win one for the fat man’ type of thing.”
He lasted less than four months in his new job, stepping down to coach the Rams.
In explaining his change of mind about the administrative job, he told The Washington Post in 1983: “When I was coaching, I bounced up as soon as the alarm clock went off in the morning. With the new job, I’d lay there for a half-hour after it went off. I knew something wasn’t right.”
John Alexander Robinson was born on July 25, 1935, in Chicago to Matthew and Ethlyn (Alexander) Robinson. The family moved to Provo, Utah, when John was 6 and later to Daly City, Calif., south of San Francisco. Attending Our Lady of Perpetual Help School, he met a fellow fifth-grader, John Madden, the future Hall of Fame coach and broadcaster, and they became lifelong friends.
“Just two doofuses from Daly City,” Robinson told The Los Angeles Times in 2021.
Robinson played football and baseball in high school in San Mateo, also in the Bay Area, and was a rarely-used receiver at the University of Oregon, where he first met McKay, then a Ducks’ assistant coach.
“I used to go into his office all the time and beg him, especially in the off-season, to teach me about football,” Robinson told The Las Vegas Sun in 2004. “I thought he was the smartest man who ever lived.”
Robinson graduated from Oregon with a bachelor’s degree in education in 1960, when he became an assistant coach with the football team. He stayed until 1972, when McKay, by then the head coach at U.S.C., hired him as his offensive backfield coach. Robinson left after three seasons to take the same position with the Oakland Raiders under Madden, the head coach.
When Robinson left the Raiders after one season to replace McKay at U.S.C., Madden told The Los Angeles Times that his old friend embodied two important qualities: “Intelligence and getting along with people.”
In seven seasons at U.S.C., Robinson compiled a record of 67-14-2. With the Rams, his record was 79-74, including four playoff victories. But the Rams lost the N.F.C. championship game twice, to the Chicago Bears in 1986 and to the San Francisco 49ers in 1990, and after the Rams’ record fell to 5-11 in 1990 and 3-13 in 1991, Robinson resigned.
He returned to U.S.C. in early 1993 for five more seasons, but he did not have the kind of success he had in his first go-round. He led the Trojans to one more Rose Bowl victory, in 1996, giving the team a 9-2-1 record. But when the team ended the 1997 season at 6-5, he was fired and replaced by Paul Hackett.
After taking a year off, Robinson returned to coaching, at U.N.L.V., in 1999, but in six seasons with the Rebels, success there was even more elusive. Inheriting a team that had lost 16 consecutive games, he had only one winning campaign, in 2000, leading U.N.L.V. to an 8-5 record and a Las Vegas Bowl victory. And after an 0-4 start in 2004, he announced he would retire at the end of the season, citing family health issues.
He left with an overall record of 28-42.
That kind of losing was new to Robinson.
“Any time you lose a game, or two games, or whatever, pressure gets on you,” he told The Reno Gazette-Journal after the third early-season loss in 2004. “Some people, when pressure gets on them, kind of want to fade. That’s one of the things I tried to say after the game: Hey, this group has given of themselves as much as you could ask. I don’t have any doubts about our players whatsoever.”
Robinson is survived by his wife, Beverly; his daughters, Terry Medina and Lynne Sierra; his sons, David and Chris; two stepchildren, Jennifer Bohle and Jeffrey Ezell; and 10 grandchildren.
In the decades after he left U.N.L.V., Robinson was a football commentator on radio and TV; provided Madden with research help when Madden was the analyst on NBC’s “Sunday Night Football,” from 2006-08; and was a consultant to L.S.U. coach Ed Orgeron, from 2019-21.
Interviewed in 2019 by Saturday Down South, a digital publisher focusing on college football in the Southeast, Robinson said he was frequently asked one question after he started working under Orgeron:
“What in the hell are you doing in the state of Louisiana?”
“And I respond,” he added, “‘Damned if I know.’”
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