First brother-in-law Craig Robinson is joining ESPN as a color commentator for this season’s college basketball coverage, the network announced.
The former Oregon State University basketball coach will debut during ESPN’s mid-November season-opening Hoops Tip-Off Marathon.
Like his sister, First Lady Michelle Obama, Robinson graduated from Princeton University, where he was a two-time Ivy League basketball player of the year in the early 1980s. At the advice of his coach, Princeton’s famed Pete Carril, Robinson left basketball to get an MBA at the University of Chicago’s Graduate School of Business. He later became a bond trader and investment banker, but decided to return to coaching in 1999, taking a massive pay cut.
He first worked six years as an assistant at Northwestern University, and then became head coach at Brown University.
In 2008, the same year his brother-in-law was elected president, Robinson became head coach at Oregon State, which had been winless the previous year. He coached there for six years, compiling a not-very-distinguished career record of 93 wins and 104 losses (which still put him fourth in wins in the school’s history), and was fired in May.
Robinson’s first game will be Nov. 18, on ESPN2, in a game between Iona and Wofford.
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(Photo Source: AP)
