Seahawks' Mike Macdonald says Broncos' Sean Payton accused him of cheating in 2024

Parker Gabriel, The Denver Post on Sep 22, 2026

Published in Football

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DENVER — Seattle head coach Mike Macdonald said recently that Broncos coach Sean Payton accused him of cheating in 2024 after the Seahawks gathered video clips of Denver’s plays during training camp.

Macdonald, who led Seattle to a season-opening win in 2024 against the Broncos — his first game as a head coach and Bo Nix’s first game as a rookie starter for Denver — said his team had “like 100 plays” of the Broncos that they’d gathered from publicly available clips that fans tweeted out during training camp.

The comments circulated Tuesday on social media and appear to be taken from a sit-down interview with Graham Bensinger, who has a popular YouTube channel. A nearly two-hour version of the interview with Macdonald was published Monday as an episode of “In Depth with Graham Bensinger” but did not include the anecdote about Payton. In the clip from the story about Payton, staffers are walking around the set, making it unclear whether the story was intended for publication.

Neither team immediately responded to The Denver Post’s requests for comment. Payton is scheduled to speak with reporters Wednesday afternoon after Denver practices. The Broncos and Seahawks play Oct. 15 at Empower Field.

Macdonald did not hold back in his comments about Payton and the Broncos.

“Funny story about Sean Payton and me,” he begins. “My first year — he’s not my biggest fan — we played them our first game. Fans will tape or post plays from training camp on Twitter. So it’s like public knowledge. So we took like 100 plays from their training camp. We were like scouting them. He got wind of it and he lost his mind. It was the middle of the season. We won the game. We were in the fight our first year and there was a lot of (stuff) going on.”

Macdonald and the Seahawks beat Denver, 26-20, to open the season, holding the Broncos to 231 total yards and Nix to 138 passing yards and two interceptions on 38 attempts.

Macdonald said Payton called Seahawks general manager John Schneider and threatened to go public with his cheating allegations and likened it to New England’s “Spygate” controversy.

“I was like, ‘We didn’t cheat.’ He thought it was a Michigan thing, where we had a plant and the whole thing. We had to counter with him and say, like, if you come out with this, we’re going to sue you because it’s not true.”

Macdonald said Payton “backed down” but was “killing” Schneider.

“The season ends and he let it go,” Macdonald said. “It was like the Cold War. Like, we’re going to hit the button, we’re going to hit the button, no we’re going to hit the button. None of us hit the button.”

Macdonald, though, said he ran into Payton coming off an elevator at the NFL scouting combine in early 2025.

“He totally backed down in this moment and I was like, ‘Oh man,’” Macdonald said.

Macdonald, of course, led the Seahawks to a Super Bowl championship in February. Before he arrived in Seattle, Macdonald was John Harbaugh’s defensive coordinator for two seasons in Baltimore. Prior to that, he was the University of Michigan’s defensive coordinator in 2021 under former Wolverines coach Jim Harbaugh.

Coaches gleaning insights from fan training camp videos has come up in other contexts recently. New Miami coach Jeff Hafley was Green Bay’s defensive coordinator before getting his current job and said his passing game coordinator, Kevin Patullo, told him that when Patullo was with Philadelphia, the Eagles had a bunch of the Packers’ blitz packages before the teams opened the 2024 season against each other in Brazil.

In recent seasons, the Broncos have tightened security around fans shooting video at camp practices. There have been signs on the temporary bleachers the past two summers that say “Protect Our Plays,” and security guards, fans have said, have asked fans to keep their phones down or risk being removed from practice.