John Robinson, who established his football roots in the Bay Area before coaching his signature run-oriented USC football team to a national title and later taking the Los Angeles Rams to two NFL conference championship games, has died. He was 89.

Robinson, whose USC teams won four Rose Bowls in his two stints with the Trojans, died Friday in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, of complications from pneumonia, USC announced.

Although Robinson had his greatest successes in Southern Calinfornia, he was a Peninsula kid.

John Alexander Robinson was born in Chicago on July 25, 1935. His father worked as a construction engineer and the family moved to Provo, Utah, when Robinson was 6. The family eventually settled in Daly City.

It was in the Bay Area where Robinson met John Madden, another future Hall of Fame coach, in elementary school. The boys attended different high schools, but the friends’ passion for football and coaching carried both to successful careers.

“Just two doofuses from Daly City,” said Robinson, wistfully repeating a phrase the two pals used often over the course of their nearly 80-year friendship.

Robinson played football and baseball at Junipero Serra High in San Mateo before moving on to Oregon, where he was a reserve receiver from 1954-58.

“I got so little playing time at Oregon,” he joked, “the zipper on my warm-up jacket rusted shut.”

Robinson joined the Oregon staff as a graduate assistant in 1958 and remained with the Ducks through the 1971 season. That’s when John McKay, an Oregon assistant during Robinson’s time there, hired Robinson as an offensive backfield coach at USC.

Robinson helped the Trojans win national titles in 1972 and 1974 before Madden convinced him to join his Oakland Raiders staff.

“As kids, we always talked about one of us coaching someday and hiring the other guy,” Madden told The Los Angeles Times’ Dwight Chapin in 1981. “I tried to hire John for the Raiders three times. Once he’d been promoted at Oregon and the other time he’d just joined USC. But I finally got him.”

Robinson stayed in Oakland for only one season.

In November 1975, with McKay headed to the NFL to coach the expansion Tampa Bay Buccaneers, USC chose the 40-year-old Robinson as his successor.

Robinson was excited about running his own team and returning to the pageantry of college football, which in USC’s case featured Traveler, the Trojans’ equine mascot who sprinted along the sideline.

“I liked it on the Raiders,” Robinson quipped, “but I really missed the horse.”

Robinson continued the Trojans’ winning tradition for seven seasons. The Rams lured him to pro football in 1983 and he led the franchise to numerous playoff appearances and the brink of two Super Bowls before returning to USC a decade later. His last coaching job was at Nevada Las Vegas, where he temporarily revived a moribund program.

After his coaching career ended in 2004, Robinson worked as a broadcaster and a volunteer assistant football coach at his grandson’s high school in San Diego County. He returned to USC as a fundraiser in 2011. In 2019, he served as a consultant for Louisiana State’s national championship team.

“I enjoyed it,” Robinson, when asked how he would like to be remembered, told The Times during an interview in May 2024. “And I think that’s the big thing — that when you get a job you enjoy it.

“You always think, ‘God, I could have done that better.’ But, you know, you have to be satisfied with what you did. I enjoyed the players just tremendously, and there were so many good ones.’ “

The affable Robinson, a 2010 inductee to the College Football Hall of Fame, was known as much for his easygoing manner and sense of humor as for his tailback-dominated football teams.

“He was as cheerful as a sunrise,” Times columnist Jim Murray wrote in 1982. “Football coaches tend to be Machiavellian in character, but Robinson was more like a country doctor healing the sick in exchange for fresh eggs.”

Robinson made no apologies for his approach. His goal was to win — and to have fun doing it.

“Coaching has that image of obsessed men driven to a point where they’ll destroy their lives,” he told The Times’ Mal Florence in 1981. “I’ll be damned if I’ll destroy my life.”

Robinson compiled a record of 104-35-4 in a combined 12 seasons at USC. Only McKay and Howard Jones won more as the Trojans’ coach.

He coached 153 games for the Rams — the most in franchise history — and compiled a 79-74 record, including a 4-6 record in the playoffs. His 79 victories, including playoff wins, were the most in Rams history until Sean McVay eclipsed his record in 2024.

Under Robinson, the Rams made the playoffs six times in his first seven seasons.