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Just to be clear, the majority of West Virginia’s focus is on Friday’s game with the crafty and also rarely defeated champions of the Southland Conference, Stephen F. Austin. A majority. Not all of it. The Mountaineers are approaching this weekend as a two-game tournament, and that means preparing for Sunday’s game.

WVU’s second-round opponent plays the late game Friday, and ordinarily coach Bob Huggins gives one assistant one team and another assistant the other team. But WVU’s opponent Sunday is Notre Dame or Tulsa or Michigan. Notre Dame is the No. 6 seed and Tulsa and Michigan – and this is so, so very stupid – are the No. 11 seeds. The selection committee gave us six (!) No. 11 seeds, the same number of No. 16 seeds it gave us.

I don’t have an explanation.

Wichita State and Vanderbilt played a play-in game Tuesday, and if you thought Gregg Marshall, Ron Baker and Fred VanVleet were going out in a play-in game, or that they even deserved to be in that spot, I’ve got a No. 16 seed I’d like to sell you on this weekend.

The other play-in affects WVU. Tulsa and Michigan play in Dayton, Ohio, tonight and then travel here to practice and meet the media tomorrow and play Notre Dame Friday. The Mountaineers will be watching, and assistant coach Ron Everhart – Deleted scene: Everhart’s scouting report for Texas Tech last week – is scouting the affair.

On television.

Everhart rather likes it and for the same reason he likes to scout teams in person and not through strictly edited clips.

“It gives you a better feel,” he said. “When the game is tight, when they come out of a timeout, the little things in a game that are going to change the game, what are they going to do offensively and defensively to benefit their teams? You get a really good feel for who the coach has a lot of confidence in and maybe who he doesn’t. It’s kind of a unique deal.”

Everhart will take tonight’s winner into the Friday night game against the Fighting Irish, and someone else will have Mike Brey’s squad.

Tonight’s task isn’t as complicated as it sounds, though.

“I’ve been doing this for so long that it’s one of those things where you kind of have a feel for it a little bit and you know what the tendencies are,” he said.

Now, the teams? That does complicate things, because Tulsa and historically bad Michigan are nowhere near the same. Imagine watching a movie in which the characters speak two different languages.

“Tulsa is a three-guard offense, and the three guards are really good,” Everhart said. “One kid, Jordan Woodard from Oklahoma’s older brother, oh, he’s a hell of a player. Everything comes down to him having the ball and making a play or setting up a scoring opportunity. They play off that kid like nobody else. You can see that and how they do it.”

So while he’s watching, Everhart processes what he sees on offense and defense and how WVU will counter it all, but he also has to overlap his team’s strengths and weaknesses and figure out how Tulsa will seek to neutralize and exploit them. It’s specific work to do that for one team.

He’s watching two, though, and Michigan, as you know, is very different. The defense isn’t solely or even mostly 1-3-1 anymore, but it’s not the same as Tulsa’s, because no two defenses are the same. Offensively, it’s a dichotomy. The Wolverines don’t have a James Woodard. Five players run the offense, and since there are options all over the court, you need to monitor the entire court.

“They spread you out and back-cut you and play out of the high post,” Everhart said. “It’s a whole different style of offense. But, by the same token, we have a certain set of defensive principles which, if we can stick to them, we’ll be fine. The problem is how do you take away what they’re doing and still be able to stick to your defensive principles — where you have to be, where your help guys have to be, how do we pressure the ball and keep it to one side, all of the things we talk about defensively. That’s the trick. After watching them, you get a feel for what they want to do and how they want to do it.”