First lady Michelle Obama’s older brother Craig Robinson has joined ESPN as a color commentator for this season’s college basketball coverage, the network announced.
Robinson was the head coach at Oregon State University basketball coach and now prepares to make his debut during ESPN’s mid-November season-opening Hoops Tip-Off Marathon.
President Obama’s brother-in-law graduated from Princeton University, just like his sister Michelle Obama, and he was a two-time Ivy League basketball player of the year in the early 1980s. Robinson immediately pursued his graduate studies at the famed University of Chicago’s Graduate School of Business.
He later became a bond trader and investment banker. Despite the exciting career and great pay, the career could not fill the void in his life for basketball. Therefore, Robinson returned 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 Princeton’s Ivy League sister school, 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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