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.
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