Seattle Seahawks coach Mike Macdonald says Sean Payton once came after his team with a Spygate-style accusation after Seattle used training camp clips posted by fans on social media.
Macdonald laid out the story in an interview with Graham Bensinger, with the full conversation appearing on Bensinger’s Patreon page. In Macdonald’s telling, the issue surfaced during his first year leading the Seahawks, right before a game against Payton’s Broncos.
“He's not my biggest fan,” Macdonald said of Payton. “So we play them (Broncos) in our first game.
So fans will tape, or post plays from training camp on Twitter, so it's public knowledge. So we took like 100 plays from their training camp; we were scouting them...
He got wind of it, and he lost it,” Macdonald said.
Macdonald said Payton then escalated things by reaching out to Seahawks general manager John Schneider.
“So he called John (Schneider) and threatened to come out publicly and do a whole Patriot, like Spygate type of thing...”
Macdonald said Seattle pushed back hard.
“So we had to counter with him, to say like, 'Hey, look, if you come out at us, we're going to sue you, because it's not true.' So he backed down, but he was killing John, our GM...” Macdonald said.
The core of the story is simple enough: Seattle used practice clips that fans had already posted online, and Macdonald says there was no rule-breaking involved. The footage was public, and the Seahawks were not hiding anything by using it.
That’s part of what makes the whole thing so wild. Payton allegedly came close to turning it into a cheating accusation, even though the material was already out there for anyone to see.
Macdonald also pointed out that this kind of thing isn’t exactly rare. Other teams have leaned on fan-shot practice footage to get a read on opponents, and the Broncos are hardly the first club to have training camp film circulating online before the season starts.
The story is likely to get another round of attention when Payton and the Broncos host Macdonald and the Seahawks in Denver for a Week 6 Thursday Night Football matchup. And unlike that first meeting, Seattle won’t need fan clips to build its game plan this time, because there should already be plenty of film on Bo Nix and the Broncos through the first five weeks of the season.
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