“Time to Get Going”: Mountaineers Begin Preseason Workouts With the Weight of a Season — and a Warning — Hanging Over Them
The whistle pierced the thin Appalachian morning air like a gunshot. At 5:30 a.m., the Mountaineers were already dripping sweat onto the turf behind the West Virginia University athletic complex. Fog clung low to the ground like a curtain of ghosts—appropriate, given the specter haunting this preseason: last year’s collapse.
Coach Marcus Landry, now in his third year at the helm, stood stone-faced, arms crossed. “This ain’t just about getting stronger,” he said gruffly. “This is about redemption.”
The Mountaineers had ended the previous season 5–7, missing bowl eligibility for the second time in three years. A locker room rift, a slew of fourth-quarter meltdowns, and a scathing ESPN documentary entitled “Appalachian Descent” had weighed heavily on the program. Boosters were uneasy. Players felt it. Coaches felt it more. Landry, in particular, had received a not-so-subtle ultimatum from the athletic director over the offseason: turn it around or turn in your badge.
So this summer wasn’t business as usual. It was war.
Inside the newly upgraded weight room, the atmosphere was militant. Position coaches barked numbers and times. Players grunted through sets, wrists taped, knees wrapped, eyes glazed with determination—or dread. Sophomore linebacker Malik Carter pushed through his fifth set of deadlifts, legs trembling. “You either show up or you get shown the door,” he muttered between breaths. “That’s where we’re at now.”
Off the field, Landry had brought in a mental conditioning specialist, Dr. Rhea Simmons, whose resume included time with Navy SEALs and Olympians. Her job? Erase the fear of failure.
“You can’t climb a mountain if you’re afraid of falling,” she told the team during one of her sunrise sessions overlooking Coopers Rock. “You have to love the climb more than you fear the fall.”
Yet the warning still hung in the air, unspoken but ever-present: this was the make-or-break year.
Team captain and fifth-year senior QB Troy Denham, who returned despite an offer from the CFL, led more than workouts—he led film sessions, route rehearsals under parking lot lights, and impromptu meetings where nothing was sugarcoated. “No one’s saving us,” he told the team one night. “This is it. We fix it now, or we become history.”
Outside observers noticed a shift. Practices were crisper. Tempo was faster. No player loafed. No rep was wasted. A quiet fire had taken hold.
Whether that fire would burn through the Big 12 or burn the whole thing down remained to be seen. But the Mountaineers were no longer running from last season.
They were staring it dead in the face—and lifting it, sprinting with it, pushing it across the turf until it stopped being a burden and became fuel.
This wasn’t just preseason. It was a reckoning.
