Broncos right tackle Mike McGlinchey knows two things can be true at the same time.
First, there are 13 games left in the season, starting with Denver’s Monday night matchup against Cincinnati at Empower Field. That’s a lot of time for teams’ fortunes to change, identities to develop, strengths to show through or weaknesses to get exposed.
Also, though, there are already three games in the rearview mirror, and the Broncos have lost two of them despite never trailing a second in the fourth quarter.
So, there’s time to find fixes. But also, the time is now.
“I think it’s just a mix of understanding what went wrong,” the Denver captain told The Denver Post last week. “Sometimes, winning can suffocate or hide your problems. So all losing does is add pressure to get it right.
“It’s Week 4, we’ve got a lot of football left, and we’ve got a lot of time to clean this stuff up, but it has to be this week.”
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McGlinchey, like head coach Sean Payton and defensive coordinator Vance Joseph, repeatedly talked about the Broncos’ need to commit fewer penalties this week. The Denver offense has had 10 second-half drives this season with a chance to extend a one-score lead to two, but has scored just six points, failed each time to create a two-score lead and been penalized on six of those possessions.
“The biggest thing for teams to start winning is to learn how to stop losing,” McGlinchey said. “The penalties, I keep harping on that. Those details, we can’t be harming ourselves and not putting ourselves in positions to win football games. The past two weeks — in Indy, we did that well on offense, but there was still that lull for a quarter or a quarter and a half. Last week, we came out and didn’t do much well at all outside of three or four drives.
“It’s about allowing yourself to be in the opportunities we’ve worked on, the looks we’ve seen, the positions coaches have put us in to succeed, and being able to repeat that over and over and over throughout the game without putting yourself in (crappy) situations.”
Even with a high level of retention from last year’s roster to this year’s, McGlinchey thinks that’s a process each team has to conquer each year.
Close games in general have been a sore spot for Payton’s team recently. The Broncos were 1-6 in one-score games last year and have played all three games within a score so far this year for a 2-8 mark since Denver drafted quarterback Bo Nix. The Broncos were 5–4 in one-score games in 2023, Payton’s first season in Denver.
“Every team has its own identity,” McGlinchey said. “Every team has its own nucleus of guys that need to bring everybody else along, and I think we have that here.”
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