The NFL schedule is not likely to renew the fading historical rivalry between the Denver Broncos and the Seattle Seahawks. The two teams are now separated by the conference divide, and, though both teams are currently good, you'd be a fool to bet on the Super Bowl producing any particular matchup, especially one featuring Bo Nix's ass. But though proximity cannot suffice, the rivalry was juiced up this week by an out-of-nowhere controversy involving the teams' head coaches and some shit that went down behind the scenes two years ago.
Mike Macdonald took over as head coach of the Seahawks in January 2024. Months later, in the run-up to the season, Macdonald prepared his team for a Week 1 matchup with the Broncos in part by finding and reviewing fan footage of Denver's training camp. Macdonald, recounting this episode in a sit-down interview for the widely syndicated In Depth with Graham Bensinger, says that his Seahawks cobbled together roughly 100 clips; they then went out and beat the Broncos, 26–20, ruining Nix's regular-season debut.
You are allowed whatever feelings about this. To Macdonald, if the Broncos permitted filming, and the videos were swirling around on social media, then this was legitimate scouting. The Seahawks, under Macdonald, do not permit filming at training camp: Per a "Know Before You Go" page on the team's website, an announcement at the end of the "Team Stretch" portion of each session will direct fans to "refrain from taking photos and videos of the practice field." I'm not sure how closely this is policed, but the Seahawks Fan Code of Conduct warns that "staff will proactively intervene" when fans fail "to follow instructions of stadium personnel," up to and including ejection and "permanent revocation of ticket privileges." It's not that Macdonald feels that every team should have video of every other team's training camp. It's that he views managing that as the responsibility of Seattle's opponents: If you don't want fan videos to become scouting tools, simply do not permit fans to take videos.
At some point around that 2024 matchup, Macdonald's counterpart, Sean Payton, learned that Seattle had used training camp videos to prepare for the Broncos. "He got wind of it and he lost it," Macdonald told Bensinger. Macdonald says Payton called Seattle general manager John Schneider and ripped him a new one, accusing the Seahawks of cheating. "He called John. He basically threatened to come out publicly and do a whole Patriot Spygate type of thing."
Macdonald of course denied any wrongdoing, and the Seahawks, swollen with umbrage, told Payton that they would sue his ass if he publicly accused them of cheating. Thus ensued a delightfully stupid standoff. "It was like the Cold War," recounted Macdonald. "He's like, 'I'm going to hit the button. I'm going to hit the button.' 'Well, we're going to hit the button.' None of us hit the button." Payton eventually let it out of his teeth, or at least resigned himself to some longer, subtler, unspoken form of vengeance.
So why is this suddenly a thing, more than two years later? It seems that Macdonald had the worst kind of oopsie during his chat with Bensinger: He said something true out loud. Sitting in a studio environment with a professional interviewer in front of hot cameras and microphones, Macdonald shared what he described Wednesday as "something I didn’t intend to come out for public use." Though he evidently did not specify to Bensinger that any portion of the conversation was off the record, Macdonald apparently did have the impression that this specific exchange took place before the formal start of the interview.
Bensinger, for his part, explained Thursday that the entire interview, including the Payton story, was "provided to Seahawks PR" five days before it was made public, for their review and approval. When they declined to flag that portion of the segment, it was uploaded and posted to YouTube on Monday. Macdonald soon became aware of it and presumably had a fun little ashen-faced freakout at his desk, putting extra curl on that little upside-down-U mouth that is his resting facial expression.
"Coach Macdonald reached out to me directly yesterday morning expressing concern," wrote Bensinger, in a statement posted Wednesday to his Twitter account. "I immediately told him we would remove that portion, and we did. Unfortunately, it had already been clipped from our interview by online outlets and circulated elsewhere. I told Coach that, in hindsight, I regretted allowing that exchange to be included and that it was my error in judgment." Groveling ensued:
"I have tremendous respect for Coach. We spent significant time together in Seattle, and I came away impressed not only by what he has accomplished in such a short period of time, but by the person he is. The last thing I want is for one exchange to overshadow that story. I also have great respect for Sean Payton, whom I had the opportunity to profile previously."
This is a tidy if humiliating bit of beat maintenance for an access journalist. An interview subject gave Bensinger an illuminating and fascinating behind-the-curtain glimpse at NFL business, and unfortunately—rats, shucks, darn darn darn—that information is now available to the public, with exactly zero durable consequences for any of the principals. Regrettable. Awful. A tragedy!
Bensinger apologized to Macdonald, and Macdonald apologized to Payton. The teams will play each other in Week 6. The Broncos have already learned their lesson: On the team's website, recording equipment is given extra visibility on the list of items prohibited at training camp.
Macdonald said Wednesday that he has learned his lesson, too. "I've got to be better in that moment. I'm responsible for what I say, really no matter the circumstance, whether you're mic'd up, whether you're not, whether you have a certain type of understanding," he told reporters. "It's something that I'm definitely going to learn from." The lesson, it would seem, is the same one learned in Denver: The flow of information is bad and must be prevented, for the sake of football.
