MORGANTOWN, W.Va. — When West Virginia takes the floor Monday night to face SMU in the first game of the Fort Myers (Florida) Tipoff it will line up 5 on 5 with the Mustangs but far more goes into the winning or losing of a basketball game than just what you see before your eyes for those 40 minutes.

Preparation is everything in this era — especially with basically six players spending most of the time on the court during games for WVU — film study is as important as on-the-court practice and analytics may trump all of it.

Josh Eilert, the new Mountaineer coach, may not have the experience that Bob Huggins brought to the game but he is certainly introducing a more “now” approach. As a former video coordinator and as someone who devours analytics, his approach is vastly different from Huggins’ in terms of preparation.

This week he has been getting into the SMU game and he has had the luxury of six days to prepare … but with such a short bench he has to be careful how he approaches practice time on the court and film study off it.

“For some guys [film study]’s way more beneficial. It depends on the basketball IQ,” he said.

But you don’t just sit them down and watch and rewatch plays and the inevitable mistakes or heroics each includes over and over.

“Anybody in this day and age has a shortened attention span … and I’m one of those. You have to understand the nuances of the modern-day athlete. You have to figure out how to keep their attention for an extended period of time and make sure you are getting something out of those film sessions,” Eilert said.

“Everybody learns differently. Some guys learn on the floor, some guys learn in the film session. Some guys learn by drawing plays up,” he went on. “You have to figure out how each guy ticks. For the most part our first six or seven guys have a fairly high basketball IQ and we can rely on the film study to get as much done there as we could on the floor.”

But the approach to it all has to be tempered by the idea that six players get nearly all the minutes, dictating the style of play that is being used and narrowing the options open to Eilert.

This gets us to analytics, the pseudo-science that is sweeping the sports world and changing the way the games be they football, basketball or baseball are played.

“Analytics is certainly a tool in terms of getting your point across to the players,” Eilert admitted. “They have to understand it. It’s so prevalent in today’s game. You see it on every broadcast.”

And Eilert admits to making use of it.

“I use it probably way more than my predecessor did for a lot of reasons. It’s a great tool to figure out where your advantages are, where your disadvantages are,” he explained.. “Over the years the data out there has become so prevalent. We subscribe to three or four analytic programs and we use them on a daily basis.”

With that said, Eilert understands it is a tool, not a finished product. It must be tailored to what fits your team, not just a color by numbers approaching to painting a game plan or offense or defense.

“It’s almost like you don’t have enough time to digest it,” he said. “You have to pick and choose what analytics work for you and what you can get out of certain analytics because you can really go down a deep, dark hole and spend all your time trying to figure out the analytics and data and how it can help you.

“Over analysis equals paralysis … I’ve heard that over the years and sometimes that comes into play. At the end of the day, you’ve got to trust your eyes. But when the data and analytics backs up what you’re thinking, I think you’re on to something.”

A Huggins or a Jim Boeheim or such has done it so long, they come to know what works and what doesn’t work for them, rendering the analytics not nearly as important.

No sport has had analytics change it more than baseball but say hello to the world champions’ manager Bruce Bochy, an old school veteran who has incorporated the new statistics into the game he manages.

Eilert looks at his roster and knows that only a part of what’s available fits his needs.

“I don’t want a high intensity game where it’s up and down. We are playing basically six guys,. Any game that is played at a slower pace falls into our hands more than an up and down battle and full-court pressure situation.”

Still, analytics plays a part in his approach. This last game, against Jacksonville State, he took Seth Wilson out of the starting lineup and inserted freshman Ofri Naveh.

“I don’t have a whole lot of variables,” Eilert said. “Moreso than not, my analytics have to do with lineup combinations. I’m hopefully going to add a few pieces in Kerr Kriisa and RaeQuan Battle in the coming weeks here, so I’ll have a few variables to add into the rotation.

“Right now, you can see which guys play really well together and which guys don’t,” he went on. “There’s a very telling stat between two guys who do not play well together, even going back to the Vanderbilt scrimmage. That’s a combination we’ve tried to avoid at all costs to make us more efficient.

“Those are the kinds of things in terms of a lineup flow chart I really dive into … who plays the best together and it had a lot to do with the change in the starting lineup and it worked well for us.”

But it’s all flexible.

“None of that stuff is set in stone,” he said. “We’re trying to figure out how to win games each and every night out, so if we see an advantage here or a disadvantage there where we might shake it up even more.”