Mike McGlinchey knows he has things he will ‘need to clean up’

ENGLEWOOD, Colo. — When the “24-hour rule” was brought up to Mike McGlinchey by an inquisitive reporter Wednesday, the Broncos’ right tackle offered a quick correction.

“Maybe 48 hours,” he said, “because you’ve got two days off.”

But McGlinchey didn’t waste it.

“I watched the film quite a bit this week,” he said Wednesday just after the Broncos’ first practice in advance of Sunday’s game against the Los Angeles Chargers.

McGlinchey wasn’t going to squander the physical-rest portion of a game week. Not after a rough outing that saw Broncos coach Sean Payton point to pressure through the right side of the offensive line as one of the root causes of the pass-protection struggles.

“There’s push from the right side,” Payton said Monday. “We’ve gotta be able to stop that.”

MIKE McGLINCHEY IS A NATURAL FOCAL POINT

The focus is often on Mike McGlinchey for various reasons.

First, there is the prominent status afforded him by his contract, the largest ever given by the Broncos to an offensive lineman. He is one-half of the NFL’s highest-paid offensive-tackle duo, with left tackle Garett Bolles and his $17.8-million 2023 cap figure occupying the other flank.

Then there is his status within the locker room. Despite being a Broncos newcomer, he earned team-captain status. He lives up to the responsibility accorded someone with that designation, patiently answering questions after every game — whether the Broncos just snapped a 16-game losing streak to the Kansas City Chiefs or got flattened in Miami by a 50-point margin.

Early in the season, a spate of false-start penalties dogged McGlinchey. But after having four infractions in a three-game span, he has just two in the last eight contests.

Now, the challenge is to get past a rough game, mostly against Houston rookie Will Anderson Jr.

Mike McGlinchey reviewed the Houston game film “quite a bit” this week: “… The film is never as good as you think, and it’s never as bad. There’s some things there that I definitely want to clean up — and definitely need to clean up for us to be successful.” pic.twitter.com/Yicpq0YI6f

— Andrew Mason (@MaseDenver) December 7, 2023

It started with a detached dissection of the film.

“You’ve just got to take the emotion out of it, take the noise out of it, take what everybody outside the building’s saying out of this, because the film is never as good as you think, and it’s never as bad,” McGlinchey explained.

“There’s some things there that I definitely want to clean up — and definitely need to clean up for us to be successful. But there also is a lot of good in that, too.

“… The battle is to keep getting better and to avoid those mistakes, and identify them and attack it — and by Wednesday, it’s flushed, because you’ve got to focus on the next opponent.”

McGLINCHEY: IT’S “VERY FIXABLE”

And that isn’t just true for him, but the Broncos’ entire pass-protection process.

“Everything that was in the Houston game that happened wrong for us is very fixable, and I think that’s something to be excited about,” he said.

Which begged the question: Had he ever seen a moment from film where things weren’t fixable?

No, he said, he hadn’t.

“I think that would be a pretty dark place to be at in football if you didn’t think you could fix the problems that you’re having,” McGlinchey said. “And that’s what football’s all about. It’s just about the constant journey of improving.

“(Left guard) Ben Powers likes to say every once in a while, ‘Football sucks sometimes.’ And it’s a matter of responding to that stuff, it’s a matter of learning from the mistakes, it’s a matter of taking your lumps and being tough enough to keep moving forward.”

Despite the frustration McGlinchey endured Sunday, he sees a road past that.

“I don’t think there’s ever a time where you watch the film and say, ‘Man, he just got me,’ or, ‘There’s nothing I can do here,’ because that would be surrendering to a loser mindset, and nobody has that here,” McGlinchey explained. “And I’m very proud of that. And certainly it’s something that we feel as though we’ve improved throughout the year — especially up front as an offensive line.

“We didn’t have our best game on Sunday — myself especially. But I feel as though we can still get better, we can still climb that ladder, because we’ve been great at times this year, and we’ve gotta be consistently great for this team to be successful.”