Shedding a bad fit

John Beilein is out as coach of the Cleveland Cavaliers, barely five months after he was in. And once again the revealed wisdom of what your mother once told you (or someone once told you) is up there on the marquee in hot neon.

MONEY AIN'T EVERYTHING, it says.

Which is to say, not even $4 million a year is worth it if the job fits you like a tuxedo fits a rhino, and that's where we are with Beilein. He's a 67-year-old career college basketball coach who got dollar-whipped into jumping to the NBA. Most people of a sane disposition looked at this and said, "Why?" The rest of those people looked at it and said, "This is never going to work."

And it didn't. And that was so, so obvious from the jump, that everything about Beilein screamed "college coach", screamed that a college campus was his true home place and "college coach at Michigan" in particular was as ironclad and proper an identity as it gets.

John Beilein as head coach of the Cavaliers never sounded right. Never looked right. Never felt right.

And so here we are in February, and the Cavs are 14-40 and dead last in the East, and Beilein was reportedly so unhappy he couldn't stand another minute in Cleveland, even though the season still has almost 30 games to run. He couldn't adjust to dealing with professional athletes, a circumstance anyone with any sense saw coming from a mile down the tracks. Implied at one point they'd been playing like "a bunch of thugs," which went over about as well as you'd expect. Abandoned almost immediately the offensive sets that worked so well at Michigan but didn't in the NBA because, well, the NBA is an entirely different animal.

All of this, every bit of it, was as easily predictable as sunrise. A man who's spent 40 years in the college bubble simply was never going to find enough oxygen to breathe outside it. It is a vastly different world out there, which is why the only college coaches who've become reasonably successful in the NBA -- Brad Stevens leaps to mind -- have been young coaches who were not fully set in their ways.

But a John Beilein?

Was never going to fly. Duh.