Troubled Raiders star went on drinking binge and disappeared before Super Bowl in tragic end to NFL career

Most football fans dream about winning the Super Bowl. 

Only few have actually gone on to be good enough to play in the NFL, and even fewer have realized their dream of lifting the Vince Lombardi Trophy. 

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But imagine that you’ve quickly developed into one of the league’s best centers, and you have been integral to helping your team reach the Super Bowl. 

You’ve waited your whole life for this moment – the biggest of your career to date – only to wage war with your inner demons, and miss the game without even realizing it at the time. 

Well, that wasn’t a dream for former Oakland Raiders center, Barret Robbins. 

No, his dream very quickly became his nightmare, and unbeknownst to him at the time, this was the beginning of the end as his career unraveled from that point onwards. 

The Raiders’ chase for Lombardi No. 4

Prior to the 2002 season, the Raiders had just reached the post-season in back-to-back years and for the first time since 1993. 

However, they would go on to lose in the Conference Championship in 2000, and suffered a Divisional Round exit in 2001. 

But after an offseason in which they cut ties with head coach Jon Gruden, as he departed for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, Raiders offensive coordinator and offensive line coach Bill Callahan stepped into the vacant head coach position. 

That season the Raiders went 11-5 with Rich Gannon under center, after he posted a career-high 4,689 passing yards and 67.6 percent pass completion rate. 

The quarterback also threw for 26 touchdowns and 10 interceptions in the regular season, and was named the league MVP. 

After seeing off the New York Jets and Tennessee Titans in dominant fashion with a combined score of 71-34, the Raiders looked fairly poised to win their fourth Super Bowl in franchise history. 

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Their opponents – Gruden’s Buccaneers. 

Whilst they also cruised to the Super Bowl having dismantled the San Francisco 49ers 31-6 in the Divisional Round before taking down the Philadelphia Eagles 27-10, the Bucs’ main disadvantage was lack of championship pedigree and experience, with Tampa Bay having never won the coveted trophy. 

Dreams shattered, nightmare reality kicked in

With Super Bowl XXXVII week in full swing, players and staff from each conference’s representatives were doing media sessions and interviews galore. 

After a hectic week, the Saturday before kickoff is a period of relaxation for most of those involved, but for Robbins, the eve of the biggest game of his career went awry. 

Making his 11 p.m. curfew on Friday night, the Pro Bowler, who had earlier in his life been diagnosed with depression during his college days studying at Texas Christian University, struggled to grapple with his feelings and emotions. 

As such, he found himself leaving the team hotel early in the morning, and jumping into a car with a group of men that he hardly knew. 

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After failing to turn up for breakfast and then the team’s final afternoon walk-through session, his teammates were initially confused, followed by a bout of concern. 

Nobody knew where the 6-foot-3 was. Had he been kidnapped? 

The concern grew so great that Raiders team executive Bruce Allen went on to inform the NFL, who then relayed his concerns to local law enforcement agencies. 

Unbeknownst to the team, and partially to Robbins himself, the Pro Bowl center was on somewhat of a bar crawl, hopping to establishments all over San Diego, and even ended up 20 miles south and across state lines in Tijuana, Mexico. 

It was later revealed that ‘B-Robb’ had felt undermined by his head coach after he made several last-minute changes to the Raiders’ game plan for Sunday.

“I was aware of all that, but I wasn’t,” Robbins recalls in a 2011 interview with broadcaster Greg Papa, who also was the voice of the Raiders on the radio, via NBC Sports Bay Area. “I wasn’t able to do the right things to get … you know … I don’t know. I just made some bad decisions, obviously.”

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Having consumed a tenfold amount of alcohol, Robbins has little recollection of that day, and he was found by ex-Raider Calvin Branch, and put in a taxi back to the team’s hotel, where he arrived on Saturday night. 

But upon his return some 14 hours later, he was – unsurprisingly – making little sense, with him having convinced himself that the Raiders had already emerged victorious against the Bucs in the Super Bowl. 

“He had told me he was excited that we had won the game,” Allen recalled. “And he asked to catch a plane for the Pro Bowl (in Honolulu) the next morning.

“We left the doctor (the late Robert Albo) with him, and he was concerned. And the doc was right, because Barret later told me everything he had drunk and done. And I was like, ‘Oh my goodness.’”

Unaware of just how much alcohol was in his system, or if any drugs were present, Albo took the precautionary approach of checking Barret into a hospital, where he remained whilst the Super Bowl was on. 

Alas, the Raiders – without their starting center – would go on to suffer a thumping 48-21 defeat to the organization’s former head coach. 

The beginning of the end

In its aftermath, Robbins shouldered some blame from his teammates, as some felt a sense of betrayal from their best lineman for abandoning them in their biggest game as a unit. 

“A lot of guys thought what Barret did was unforgivable at the time,” former Raiders teammate Tim Brown said, via Sports Illustrated. “But as the years pass you come to realize that he had serious issues, that not everything was under his control. Everyone knew Barret was unstable even then, but I think now everybody has a much better understanding of the things he was dealing with.” 

Mental illness is mental illness, it can strike anyone at any point, no matter who they are. It won’t just wait for a person, even an NFL All-Pro center like Robbins, to perform in the Super Bowl before clouding over and consuming him. 

Though he had dealt with bouts of depression and substance abuse long before he achieved his goal of reaching the NFL, B-Robb was later diagnosed with bipolar disorder, with his bar hopping across San Diego part of a two-week-long manic episode he was later known to be suffering at the time.

“In my mind, we had already won the Super Bowl and we were celebrating,” Robbins explained on HBO’s ‘Real Sports’, via NFL FanHouse. “That’s how delusional I was.”

In 2015, Robbins did an interview with Sports Illustrated, where he acknowledged and accepted all accountability of his wrong-doings back in 2003, whilst also admitting that he struggles with Super Bowl Sunday every year. 

“Some football guys get together and drink, some guys get together and smoke, some guys get together and do drugs. I did all of them,” Robbins said. “I get depressed on Super Bowl Sunday. It’s hard for me to watch. I think about it all the time. I hit myself in the head and say, ‘Damn, if I just could have done this or would have done that.’”

As the events that transpired on that Super Bowl weekend in San Diego were as a result of a serious mental health break, the Raiders opted not to release Robbins at the end of the season. Instead, he regained his starting job for the 2003 campaign. 

However, his name was on the list of those involved in the Bay Area Laboratory Co-operative (BALCO) scandal, where they had sold performance-enhancing drugs to several high-profile athletes. 

After testing positive for “the clear” – a steroid – the Raiders released him in the summer of 2004, and unfortunately, then aged-30, he never played another down in the NFL ever again.

“I’m doing real well,” Robbins said in an interview a few years ago.

“I’m happy to be where I’m at. Being comfortable in my own skin is very underrated when it comes to dealing with substance abuse and being bipolar. I’ve come a long way in the last year. It’s good to have a fresh start. I got to get some emotions out and put some things in the past, so I’m very grateful.

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