Barret Robbins

Barret Glenn Robbins was born on August 26, 1973, in Houston, Texas. He grew up in the city and attended Sharpstown High School in southwest Houston, where he played football well enough to earn a place at Texas Christian University. His father, Dean "Rob" Robbins, later went back to college at 46 and earned a degree at 50, an example he hoped would inspire his son's own comeback. His mother died in 1999. Details of any siblings have not been made public.

Robbins graduated from Sharpstown High School in Houston and played college football at Texas Christian University (TCU) in Fort Worth from 1991 to 1994. As a senior in 1994 he was named first-team All-Southwest Conference, and TCU played in the 1994 Independence Bowl, its first postseason game in a decade. During his time at TCU he was diagnosed with depression and anxiety and was hospitalized after a psychotic episode, in which he was found disoriented in a car dealership parking lot.

The Raiders, then in their final season in Los Angeles before returning to Oakland, selected Robbins in the second round of the 1995 NFL draft with the 49th overall pick. In 1996 he took over from Dan Turk and became only the fifth regular starting center in Raiders history, after Jim Otto, Dave Dalby, Don Mosebar and Turk.

Under head coach Jon Gruden, Robbins started every game in 2000 between guards Steve Wisniewski and Mo Collins as Oakland scored 479 points, went 12 and 4, won the AFC West and shut out Miami 27 to 0 in the divisional round before losing the AFC Championship Game to Baltimore. A week before that game he briefly went missing but reappeared in time to play. An injury limited him to two games in 2001.

In 2002, Bill Callahan's first season as head coach, Robbins started all 16 games for an offense led by MVP quarterback Rich Gannon that scored 450 points. Oakland beat the New York Jets and the Tennessee Titans to win the AFC title, and Robbins was voted to the Pro Bowl and named first-team All-Pro.

On the Friday night before Super Bowl XXXVII in San Diego, he left the team hotel, missed the final meetings and walk-through, and spent much of Saturday in Tijuana, Mexico, after stopping his medication. Callahan suspended him for the game, Adam Treu started at center, and Tampa Bay won 48 to 21. Robbins returned in 2003 and regained his starting job for nine games during a 4 and 12 season. After he appeared before the BALCO grand jury and a retested urine sample showed the designer steroid THG, the Raiders released him in the summer of 2004. He played 121 games with 105 starts, all for the Raiders.

Robbins married Marisa (also spelled Marissa in later reports), and the couple had two daughters, Madison and Marley. The family lived in Pleasanton, California, during his Raiders years. In 2004, after his release, he asked for a divorce and Marisa moved with the girls to Southern California; in 2009 she said the divorce was still pending. She remained part of his life, and it was Marissa Robbins who informed Tim Brown of his death in 2026, with Brown referring to her as his wife.

After football his life was shaped by bipolar disorder and substance abuse. He was arrested in San Francisco in December 2004, shot by Miami Beach police in January 2005, and spent nearly 22 months in jail awaiting trial or for probation violations by early 2009. He went through rehab programs and halfway houses in Florida and Texas, served a prison sentence in Florida from 2011 to 2012, and faced further arrests in Boca Raton in 2016 and Delray Beach in 2020. In his final years he lived in Florida and kept a low profile. He once said he would enjoy going to cooking school, coaching, or writing a book.

Robbins became one of the first NFL players whose mental illness was discussed in such public detail. In interviews, especially with HBO's Real Sports in 2009 and NBC Sports Bay Area in 2011, he described his bipolar disorder plainly. "I was sick," he said. "I was in a bad state of mind. I was mentally ill, for sure." He admitted that before his diagnosis he had self medicated his mood swings with alcohol, cocaine, marijuana and steroids, and that he had been in a manic state during the 2002 playoff run. From a Houston treatment facility in 2009 he said, "I'm fed up with things the way they've been and I'm tired of being sick." His wife, Marisa, said she gave interviews so that his illness would not be dismissed as weakness or an excuse.

On the field, Robbins is remembered as one of the best centers of his era and a key part of the Raiders' run of three straight AFC West titles from 2000 to 2002, ending with an AFC championship. Off the field, his disappearance before Super Bowl XXXVII remains one of the most discussed stories in Super Bowl history and is often cited among the reasons Oakland lost so heavily, a view Rich Gannon rejected. His story is now widely retold as an early, painful example of how severe mental illness can collide with professional sport, and it featured in HBO's Real Sports, NBC Sports Bay Area's Sports Uncovered podcast and many later retrospectives.

First-team All-Southwest Conference (1994, TCU). Pro Bowl selection (2002 season). First-team All-Pro (2002). AFC champion with the Oakland Raiders (2002 season). Three AFC West division titles with the Raiders (2000, 2001, 2002).

Robbins' disappearance became a fixture of Super Bowl lore. He told his own story to Andrea Kremer for HBO's Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel, aired on July 21, 2009, and gave a long interview to NBC Sports Bay Area in 2011 that was later featured in its Sports Uncovered series. Former Raiders chief executive Amy Trask, teammate Jon Ritchie and others have discussed the episode in podcasts and broadcasts. In 2009 he also gave the San Francisco Chronicle his first Bay Area interview since the 2005 shooting, and around 2021 he told the Fort Worth Star-Telegram he was thinking about starting his own podcast.

Robbins' name appeared among athletes linked to the Bay Area Laboratory Co-operative (BALCO). He testified before the federal grand jury in late 2003, and a retest of one of his samples showed THG, the designer steroid known as "the clear". His legal troubles included a December 2004 arrest for punching a security guard at San Francisco's Sir Francis Drake Hotel; a January 2005 confrontation with Miami Beach police in which he was shot and later charged with attempted murder, resolved by a 2006 plea agreement with five years' probation and mandatory mental health treatment; a 2010 arrest near Dallas for crack cocaine that led to a five-year Florida prison sentence in 2011, from which he was released in September 2012; an August 2016 arrest in Boca Raton on felony battery charges after allegedly punching a woman and her daughter; and a November 2020 arrest in Delray Beach after allegedly leaving a restaurant without paying and throwing a rock at an employee.

Barret Robbins died in his sleep overnight on March 26, 2026, at the age of 52. Former teammate Tim Brown announced the news on X that evening after a call from Marissa Robbins, writing that he "passed peacefully in his sleep" and asking people to pray for "their girls, his family and tons of teammates". The Las Vegas Raiders confirmed his death on March 27 in a statement describing him as "among the league's top centers". No cause of death was made public, and the place of death and funeral arrangements were not reported. Some databases list March 27, the date the team confirmed the news, but the Fort Worth Star-Telegram and Wikipedia give March 26.