The San Francisco 49ers heartbreakingly lost Super Bowl LIV. A late fourth-quarter collapse kept the team from its sixth Lombardi trophy. Most of the team has moved on from the defeat and shifted focus toward the 2020 season, and improving enough to get over the hump.
Mike McGlinchey was part of the 49ers' online draft party on Thursday and knows his squad isn't far from being where it wants to be — celebrating at the end of the season as Super Bowl champions. This year's draft will play into achieving that goal.
"We have leadership in our building that doesn't let details slip away," McGlinchey told Keiana Martin. "Fortunately, we have most of our roster from a Super Bowl run coming back, and we're going to hopefully add some new pieces here tonight. But our team is still together, for the most part. We have some high number of starters returning on both sides of the ball, which is huge, and a great job by John (Lynch) and Kyle (Shanahan) to get that done.
"What it comes down to is being seven minutes better, and once we can do that, and it's not a big change. We've got to do the same things that we did last year, just try to improve a little bit every single day, and I think that will make us seven minutes better, in the long run."
General manager John Lynch explained on Monday why it's even more important this year that San Francisco hits on each of its draft picks.
"We have one of the better rosters in football, in my mind, and so it's going to be real hard for draft picks to make this (team), as well," Lynch told reporters. "I don't think it'd be a great year to have 10 draft picks. I think it's going to be hard to make this team, so we've got to make them count. That's the feeling every year, but especially this year with very few (picks)."