Robinson: a Winning Program From Nothing

Perhaps nowhere else in America has the Land of Opportunity been more fertile than in this sleepy community in Northeast Louisiana. For Grambling is where the son of a sharecropper built, with his bare hands, one of the best-known and most successful football programs.

Before each Grambling State football game in the early 1940s, Eddie Robinson would mow the football field and line it. At the half, he would direct the band and the drill team. And when the game was over, because no one cared enough about a small black school deep in the backwoods, Robinson even would write the game story for the newspapers.

“I would tear out articles about other teams in the newspapers,” Robinson recalled last week. “If we won big, I would just insert our name into the stories in which schools won by large margins. If we won a close game, I would rewrite the close game story and put our school in it. If we lost, I’d write an alibi.

“I wasn’t too good,” Robinson said, “but I’d start each story like, ‘On a cold day in Grambling--, ‘ something like that. Then I’d send it off to Western Union.”

And of course, during the games, Robinson would coach. That is what he liked most. That is what he did best.

“I’ve been very fortunate to be a part of this great country,” Robinson, 66, said on the eve of becoming college football’s all-time winningest coach. “A person has a chance to do anything here that he wants to, if he puts forth the effort.”

Robinson has had 25 consecutive winning seasons and only two losing records in 42 seasons at Grambling. His teams have won 14 Southwestern Athletic Conference titles. And for those who think his school is just a football factory, his graduation rate has been estimated to be 80%.

This season, Grambling is 4-0 and ranked second in the nation among Division I-AA schools. It could be the school’s strongest team since the 1980 squad went 10-2 and reached the I-AA playoffs.

There’s something else--Grambling has sent more than 200 players to the pros. Robinson had 43 players in pro camps in 1971, more than any coach before or since. Two of his former players, Willie Brown and Tank Younger, are members of the NFL Hall of Fame.

But most people, when they remember Robinson, will remember his record of 324-106-15. Everyone, that is, except Robinson.

He has downplayed the significance of breaking the record of the late Paul “Bear” Bryant as college football’s winningest coach ever since it became apparent he had the best chance to do it.

“The record is not Eddie Robinson’s,” he said. “The record is Grambling’s, and that’s the way it is.”

In 1941, 22-year-old Eddie Robinson graduated from now-defunct Leland College in Baker, La. That summer, after the railroad closed, the town became economically strapped.

Times were even rougher for Robinson when he married his childhood sweetheart, Doris Mott, and the couple was expecting its first child. Robinson went to work in a feed mill in Baton Rouge, La., for 25 cents an hour.

Doris’ aunt, who attended summer school at Louisiana Negro Normal and Industrial Institute, a small college in the northeast part of the state, told Robinson that the school needed a football coach. The pay was attractive--$63.75 per month.

Robinson, who played quarterback at Leland, was hired. But on arrival, his first meeting with school president Ralph Waldo Emerson Jones was not encouraging.

“We fought about baseball, of all things,” Robinson said. “See, I thought I was a pretty good hitter. He said he could strike me out. I insisted I could hit his curve. Well, this conversation got a little heated. We talked about borrowing a baseball and going to the yard.

“He also told me I couldn’t coach. He told me I had to learn to coach.”

Robinson did not have a full-time assistant coach, so he hired the night watchman. “He had to change his sleeping hours but not his regular job, because the president wanted him to remain the night watchman,” Robinson said.

The school also changed its name to Grambling State. “I don’t know why (Jones) did it, but I think it was because of the cheerleaders,” Robinson said. “Before they could say ‘Hold that line, Louisiana Negro Normal and Industrial Institute,’ hell, the other team would score.”

Robinson went 3-5 in his first year, but the team was 8-0 the next. World War II canceled the next two seasons, then Robinson returned in 1945 for a 10-2 season.

The school first achieved national acclaim when a big, powerful running back nicknamed “Tank” scored 25 touchdowns in 1948 and one year later attracted the attention of Eddie Kotal, a scout with the Los Angeles Rams. Finally, a black man would be paid to play football.

As Grambling players such as Ernie Ladd, Buck Buchanan, Willie Davis and Willie Brown entered the NFL, the program and Robinson became as popular with blacks as boxer Joe Louis had been. Robinson took his team on the road, like the old Negro League baseball teams, and played before huge crowds in Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas and New York. Everyone wanted to know who the next “Tank” would be.

And everyone wanted to meet the man who produced all that talent.

Robinson’s approach to the game has changed little since becoming Grambling’s head coach.

He started with the double-wing formation and used it until 1959, then switched to the wing-T. He used the 6-2 defense until 1963, then switched to the 4-3 pro set. Robinson still uses the wing-T and 4-3, with added variations.

“Some people don’t have the guts to go with what they believe,” Robinson said. “I believe in dancing with the woman you brought to the dance.”

And Robinson continues the chore of waking his players every morning at 6:30 with a bell. If they get up, they go to breakfast. And if they go to breakfast, they better go to class.

Few, if any, question his coaching style.

“You know what he’s going to do, but he’s so efficient,” said Alcorn State Coach Marino Casem, who has coached against Robinson for 21 years. “He just outexecutes you. The people he has know what they’ve got to do, and they do it.”

“There are certain things he does that don’t make sense, but it works,” said Calvin Nicholas, a split end on the current Grambling squad. “We have a sweep play called 28-run. We once ran it five times in a row. The defense set up for it, but it worked five times in a row.”

Robinson’s former players say they have received more from Robinson than the ordinary coaching instruction some coaches dispense.

“Not only did he have the feeling that any player who left Grambling could go into pro football with minimal adjustment, he was determined to see that you could go into other fields and be equally prepared,” said Davis, now a successful businessman. “He had this tremendous concern for you.”

“He was a helluva motivator,” Younger said. “He was tough, but he was strict in a way that you accepted it.”

“You think of people being just coaches until you think about Coach Robinson,” said quarterback Doug Williams, formerly of the Tampa Bay Bucs. “He was concerned about how you represented yourself in America.”

“He always stressed becoming good members of society,” said James Gregory, who in the early ‘70s became the first white player to play at Grambling. “He built pride in yourself and built confidence. His thoughts and opinions as to what I should do have always been pretty strong with me.”

Robinson’s unusually high degree of success did not create any extraordinary opportunities for him.

His early teams, as was the case for many blacks during that time, were subjected to second-class treatment. Meals were eaten behind diners or on the roadside. The team, regardless whether it won on the field, lost in white society.

“He went through a lot of everything,” Davis said. “Looking back makes you appreciate even more what he’s done today.”

Robinson prefers not to discuss the incidents of racism he experienced.

“I’m not making anyone pay for what happened,” Robinson said. “The fact that you weren’t going to let me use your restroom would not cause me to make a scene. I wasn’t accepting what was wrong, but I had to live in the system before I could change it. I figured it couldn’t go on forever.

“I compare it to when people ask me about black coaches in the NFL.”

Robinson was considered seriously for only one NFL head coaching job, by the Rams in 1977. Carroll Rosenbloom, the late Rams owner, approached Robinson and interviewed him along with George Allen and others with pro experience.