Perhaps people will be able to identify Craig Robinson after what he's accomplished in his first season at Oregon State.
The Beavers were a dismal 6-24 last year including losses in all 18 Pac-10 games, part of a season-ending 20-game losing skid. But after winning at Cal and Stanford in its last two games, OSU is 8-10 and in 8th place in the Pac-10 with a 3-5 league mark.
Robinson evidently is not well known to most of the country, as the coverage of Tuesday's Presidential inauguration demonstrated.
As President Barack Obama's brother-in-law, Robinson received quite a bit of camera time on Tuesday, but NBC news anchor Brian Williams identified Robinson as Reggie Love, a former football and basketball player at Duke who is now Obama's personal assistant.
ABC's Charles Gibson pointed out that Robinson was displaying his Princeton colors when he was shown wearing a black and orange scarf, but, in fact, Robinson was wearing the scarf in honor of his current employer, Oregon State, which has the same colors as Robinson's alma mater.
Finally, NBC's Tom Brokaw noted that Robinson is coach "of a school in Oregon." Presumably, if Robinson had been the coach at UCLA, Brokaw would not have said he was the coach "at a college in California."
Despite his national identity problem, Robinson is making waves in basketball, and even opponents are starting to notice.
"It's not the Oregon State of last year," Stanford guard Anthony Goods said last week before the Beavers rolled past the Cardinal, 77-62, on Saturday.
The Beavers' top scorer, sophomore guard Calvin Haynes at 16.2 points per game, averages nearly six points more than any teammate, but he has yet to start a game, and 6-11 center Roeland Schaftenaar spends his time on the perimeter and went 4-for-4 on three-pointers in the 69-65 win at Cal last Thursday.
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)
Must credit the San Francisco Chronicle
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