Metaphor alert! Craig Robinson, Michelle Obama’s older brother (whom she credits for helping her get into Princeton, where she wrote an appalling graduation thesis), has left behind a basketball program in ruins at Oregon State after 6 years as its head coach. Brent Scher of The Daily Caller notices the family tradition that has been forged.

[Craig] Robinson, Michelle Obama’s brother, was fired by Oregon State after six straight disappointing seasons as head coach—the team went 39–69 in the Pac 12 and never made the NCAA Tournament or the NIT.

Not only did Robinson fail to get results at Oregon State, he also left a mess for new coach Wayne Tinkle. Tinkle inherited a team without a single player averaging four points a game.

He had to hold open tryouts to fill out the team’s roster—a practice almost unheard of for a program playing in a major conference.

Mirroring the number of people who have dropped out of the nation’s workforce under Obama, Oregon State’s fans also dropped out:

Just 1,351 people showed up to watch Oregon State lose to Radford in the first round of the post-season College Basketball Invitational in Robinson’s final game as the team’s head coach.

The Robinson family, which Barack Obama chose to enter, is quite a bunch. Just yesterday we learned that matriarch Marion Robinson, mother of  Craig and Michelle, admitted with a laugh that she had misgivings about her daughter marrying a biracial man. But, as the New York Daily News sarcastically noted, “it could have been worse.”

“That didn’t concern me as much as had he been completely white,” Robinson laughed in the appearance on WTTW’s “Chicago Tonight,” which was scarcely noticed at the time.

Imagine for a moment if Barbara Bush had said something like this about her son Jeb choosing to wed a Hispanic woman. Would her words have remained unnoticed?

That’s quite a surrogate clan that Obama chose to affiliate with, having no father and a mother who died young.  You don’t get to choose your family, but you do get to choose your in-laws.