Mike McGlinchey's Philly return will have a special wrinkle

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SOUTH BEND, Ind. — Notre Dame will practice at William Penn Charter School Saturday morning before heading to Lincoln Financial Field for a primetime kickoff against Temple, giving redshirt sophomore right tackle Mike McGlinchey an even more familiar Philadelphia homecoming.

McGlinchey graduated in 2013 from William Penn Charter School and estimated he’ll have close to 200 friends and family from the Philadelphia area in attendance for Saturday’s Notre Dame-Temple game.

“It’ll be nice seeing some familiar faces back home and getting back there and seeing the old school again,” McGlinchey said.

William Penn Charter School has a relatively small football program — it just had FieldTurf installed this month — and that gave the 6-foot-7, 310 pound McGlinchey a steep learning curve upon arriving in South Bend. He didn’t received first-team reps until being subbed in for Christian Lombard in the second quarter at USC last year, and earned his first career start a month later in the Music City Bowl against LSU.

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The reminders that McGlinchey is still on that learning curve pop up from time to time — he was guilty of two false start penalties at Clemson and one at Virginia, Notre Dame’s only road games to date — but coach Brian Kelly said for the most part, he makes up for his lack of experience with elite length and athleticism.

“You really have to trust in your evaluation and trust that you're going to get somebody that is committed to that developmental process,” Kelly said. “And we knew Mike and how hard of a worker he was and we knew what we were getting with a workman-like attitude that he has every day and then Harry (Hiestand) has done a great job of developing him.

“So you bring those two together and we knew that we were going to have something that was going to give us the kind of play that he has. He's still scratching the surface, you know. Every day is, I think, for him, he sees things that he has not seen before. But the length, the athleticism, makes up for a lot of things that he had not seen before.”

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While McGlinchey grew up a fan of the Philadelphia Eagles, but his NFL allegiances switched later in life to the team fellow Philadelphia native Will Fuller supports.

"I still root for the Eagles," McGlinchey said, "but my heart's to the Falcons as well now because of family."

That's because McGlinchey's cousin, Matt Ryan, is Atlanta's starting quarterback.

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