A higher hire?

There's always an urge to ramp up the theme from "Jaws" when this sort of news comes down the pipe, or some other appropriate Music of Foreboding. Because how many times have we seen elite college basketball coaches meet Robert Shaw's fate when they make the leap to the NBA?

Bitten in half and dragged under. That's about the size of it most times.

Most times.

But now comes John Beilein, who took a lot of folks by surprise (a fair amount of them in Ann Arbor) when word got out he would be the next coach of the Cleveland Cavaliers at the advanced age of 66. In so doing, he follows a path that's been blazed by many, and conquered by few. The pecking order, after all, is so upside-down and inside-out.

Few despots in history, you see, have wielded the kind of power a head coach at an elite college program has traditionally wielded. They are benign despots, with some notable exceptions -- (cough) Bob Knight (cough) -- but everything in the program, the entire culture, flows from them. It's why Rick Pitino pleading innocence to his assistant running a whorehouse at Louisville, or Sean Miller pleading innocence to the buyer's market that apparently is Arizona basketball, is ludicrous on its face.

And in the NBA?

In the NBA, the coach serves at the pleasure of a team's superstar, and occasionally at the pleasure of an assistant coach if the assistant coach and the superstar are particularly tight. That's a reality Frank Vogel is about to discover in L.A.; in signing on as head coach of the clown show that is the Lakers, he willingly agreed to be subservient to LeBron, and to LeBron's bud Jason Kidd as assistant coach -- and to some extent, to front office chief Rob Pelinka.

That's a lot of names above his on the masthead.

And yet ...

And yet, this could work, for the team LeBron fled. And that is entirely because of who John Beilein is and how he approaches the job.

Certainly there's no disputing his coaching bonafides. To begin with, he's never been anything but a head coach, from high school through junior college through all three divisions of NCAA basketball. Recognized everywhere as an offensive whiz and impeccable teacher of the game, he coached Michigan to two Final Fours and four Big Ten tournament and regular-season titles in 12 seasons. If Tom Izzo  over in East Lansing is generally recognized as the No. 1coach in the Big Ten, Beilein was ranked no lower than 1A.

More importantly, he has never been the sort of autocrat that so often fails at the NBA level. Never pedantic, always willing to adapt to the game's shifting constructs, he also possesses an awareness of others not commonly found among his species. That will serve him well when dealing with a room crowded with the sort of egos that populate the NBA; Brad Stevens, who went from Butler to success in Boston with Celtics, seems to possess a similar gift.

So ... yeah. This could work.

This time.