Well after researching dozens of articles I formulated a two-step approach to achieve what I needed. For others who may come across this here is what I did:
Step 1: created a stored procedure to loop through and assign a number to each record. The numbers where 1-3 to represent the three round robin values I had (2, 5, 9). Below is the procedure:
DROP PROCEDURE IF EXISTS ezloop;
DELIMITER ;;
CREATE PROCEDURE ezloop()
BEGIN
DECLARE n, i, z INT DEFAULT 0;
SELECT COUNT(*) FROM `table` INTO n;
SET i = 1;
SET z = 1;
WHILE i < n DO
UPDATE `table` SET `group` = z WHERE `id` = i;
SET i = i + 1;
SET z = z + 1;
IF z > 3 THEN
SET z = 1;
END IF;
END WHILE;
End;
;;
DELIMITER ;
CALL ezloop();
Step 2: created a simple UPDATE statement to update each of the values to my actual round robin values and ran it once for each group:
UPDATE `table` SET `group` = 9 WHERE `group` = 3;
UPDATE `table` SET `group` = 5 WHERE `group` = 2;
UPDATE `table` SET `group` = 2 WHERE `group` = 1;