College Football Hall of Fame coach John Robinson is set to join LSU’s staff in a supporting role, the program has announced.
Robinson, 83, will work as an adviser to LSU head coach Ed Orgeron. “I’ve missed being around a team,” Robinson told The Athletic‘s Bruce Feldman. “I’m really excited about this.”
“I want to welcome Coach Robinson and his wife Miss Beverly to the LSU Family,” Orgeron said. “Coach has been a great friend and mentor to me and he will be a very valuable resource for us in growing our championship culture at LSU.”
Robinson has not been in coaching since 2010 and has not coached a college team since 2004, the end of his 6-year run at UNLV. That was the end of a long, slow denouement to Robinson’s Hall of Fame career, built on a 4-year stretch at USC from 1976-79 in which his Trojans teams went 41-5-1 with three Pac-10 championships, three Rose Bowl victories, three AP No. 2 finishes and a 1978 national championship via the coaches’ poll.
Robinson left USC after the 1982 season to lead the Los Angeles Rams then, after taking a respite through the 1992 season, returned to USC in ’93 to lead the Trojans for five more seasons. He shared two Pac-10 crowns in his second term, peaking with a victory in the Rose Bowl and a No. 12 ranking to culminate the 1995 season, but went 12-11 in his final two seasons at USC and 28-42 in six campaigns in Las Vegas. Since leaving UNLV after the 2004 season, Robinson has only worked through a moonlighting gig as the defensive coordinator at California’s San Marcos High School for the 2010 season.
Orgeron and Robinson never directly overlapped at USC. Oregon arrived in 1998 under Paul Hackett, Robinson’s successor, then hung around in Los Angeles under the regimes of Pete Carroll, Lane Kiffin and, finally, himself, leaving in a huff after a 6-2 run as USC’s interim head coach in 2013.
Oregon has been consistent in seeking seasoned counsel during his time as LSU’s head coach. He employed now 77-year-old Pete Jenkins as his defensive line coach in 2016-17, and now brings in Robinson to advise him.