NEW ORLEANS – The Greater New Orleans Sports Hall of Fame will hold its annual awards banquet on Saturday, August 8 at the Mercedes-Benz Superdome. The Greater New Orleans Sports Awards Committee, sponsored by the Allstate Sugar Bowl, selects annual award winners in a variety of categories, in addition to selecting each year’s Hall of Fame class and Amateur Athletes of the Month. Overall, 24 individuals and two teams will be honored at this year’s banquet. The honorees are being announced over an eight-day period. Annual award winners will be introduced on Wednesday, followed by the Corbett Award winners, for the top male and female amateur athletes in the state and the 2015 Hall of Fame class.
Broderick Fobbs, the head football coach at Grambling State University, will be recognized at the event as the 2014-15 recipient of the Eddie Robinson Award. The award is presented annually to an athlete, coach, team or athletic administrator in Louisiana who demonstrates the qualities most associated with Grambling legend Eddie Robinson: outstanding achievement in athletics, academics, sportsmanship and citizenship by maximizing the use of limited resources.
Fobbs is being honored after taking over the reins of the award’s namesake’s program and lifting it up from depths to which it had never fallen in history – a combined record of 2-21 during the 2012-2013 seasons. Things sunk so low that the 2013 season was most memorable due to a player revolt related to dissatisfaction with athletic facilities and travel accommodations. The week-long boycott forced cancellation of a road game against Jackson State.
One of the most recognized brands in college football was getting recognition for all the wrong reasons. Enter Fobbs, a Grambling alum who was one of the few coaches to jump at the vacant head coaching position. All he did was lead the G-Men to seven wins – one win away from playing for the Southwestern Athletic Conference Championship.
“Just the name Eddie Robinson, that says it all for me. It’s just a tremendous honor to receive an award with his name on it,” beamed the man who captained two editions of Grambling teams coached by Robinson.
The 2014 Grambling Tigers lost the first three games of the season before putting together a seven-game winning streak.
The victory-string was snapped by Alabama State, however the Tigers entered the Bayou Classic against arch-rival Southern needing a win for a spot in the conference title game. Grambling fell short in a 52-45 thriller, completing the year with a 7-5 record and one of the most remarkable turnarounds in recent college football history.
Fobbs says he relied on one of many lessons he learned from the man whose name graces this award.
“Just the importance of discipline and getting up every day and dusting yourself off and continuing to work and do your job.”
The 2014 SWAC Coach of the Year heard the wisdom of Eddie Robinson his entire life. Before getting those life lessons from the man himself as a Grambling student-athlete, it was drilled into his psyche by his father Lee Fobbs, an outstanding running back at Grambling under Coach Robinson in the late sixties and currently a member of Broderick’s coaching staff.
“He had a Plan A going in but he did not have a Plan B because he really believed in Plan A. He didn’t believe it would fail,” says the proud father.
“He’s done a great job with his staff and with the kids in terms of where he wants them to go academically. I just think it’s fitting that he would win this award.”
Story submitted by Ro Brown of the Greater New Orleans Sports Selection Committee.
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