Background
Robinson was born on February 13, 1919 in Jackson in East Feliciana Parish in South Louisiana, to the son of a sharecropper and a domestic worker.
Robinson was born on February 13, 1919 in Jackson in East Feliciana Parish in South Louisiana, to the son of a sharecropper and a domestic worker.
Robinson attended Leland College in Baker, La. , where he played quarterback and led the team to a combined 18–1 record over the 1939 and 1940 seasons.
During his final two years at Leland, he also served as an assistant coach. He earned his bachelor’s degree in 1941 and received a master’s degree from the University of Iowa in 1954.
In 1941 Grambling (then known as Louisiana Negro Normal and Industrial Institute) hired Robinson to coach football and basketball and teach physical education. In his first season he had no assistants and no budget for replacing equipment. He handled virtually everything himself, from mowing the field to taping players’ ankles to writing accounts of the games for the local newspaper. That season his team posted a record of 3–5. The next season, however, he guided the team to a perfect 8–0 record.
Robinson’s Grambling Tigers went on to have two more perfect seasons, capture 17 conference titles, and win several National Negro championships. In the 1960s, after several decades when football at historically black colleges went largely unnoticed by most football fans, Robinson’s Grambling teams gained fame for sending more players into professional football than any school except Notre Dame. Among the more than 200 of his players who went on to compete in the National Football League were Hall of Fame members Willie Davis, Willie Brown, and Buck Buchanan. The racial integration of college football in the South in the 1970s ended this brief period of football glory for Grambling and other black colleges.
Surpassing Bear Bryant’s record for wins, Robinson earned his 324th career victory on October 5, 1985, with a 27–7 defeat of Prairie View A&M in Dallas. At the end of the 1997 season, he retired with a lifetime record of 408–165–15. Robinson’s record of 408 career victories stood until 2003, when it was broken by John Gagliardi, coach of St. John’s of Minnesota. The recipient of numerous awards, Robinson was inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame in 1997.
Robinson developed Alzheimer's disease after his retirement. He died on April 3, 2007, at Lincoln General Hospital in Ruston, Louisiana, after having been admitted earlier in the day.
He was an American collegiate gridiron football coach, who set a record (later surpassed) for most career wins (408).
Grambling named its football facility, built in 1983, Eddie Robinson Stadium. A street on GSU's campus is also named for him. In 1985 South 13th Street in Baton Rouge, Louisiana was renamed for him. The Los Angeles Football Classic Foundation's black college football national championship trophy was named for Robinson in 1988. Beginning in 1994, a separate Eddie Robinson Trophy was awarded in Atlanta to the top HBCU player of the year. The Eddie Robinson Classic (held from 1997–2002) was named for him, as was the Eddie G. Robinson Classic (begun in 2015). In 1997 the Football Writers Association of America's Eddie Robinson Award was renamed for him. Robinson was awarded the General Robert R. Neyland trophy by the Knoxville Quarterback club in 1999. The American Urban Radio Networks named its HBCU coach of the year trophy for Robinson.
Robinson received the Amos Alonzo Stagg Award from the American Football Coaches Association (AFCA) in 1982 and the Amos Alonzo Stagg Coaching Award from the United States Sports Academy in 1985. Robinson was the 1992 winner of the Bobby Dodd Coach of the Year Award, which was established to honor the NCAA Division I football coach whose team excels on the field, in the classroom, and in the community. The award is named for Bobby Dodd, longtime head football coach of the Georgia Tech Yellow Jackets; it was established in 1976 to honor the values that Dodd exemplified.
Robinson and his wife, Doris, had two children; Eddie, Jr. and Lillian Rose Robinson.
