Mike Macdonald says Sean Payton once went after the Seahawks over what looked like a Spygate-style issue, and the story has all the makings of a classic NFL sideline feud.
Macdonald told Graham Bensinger that the whole thing started during his first season in Seattle, when the Seahawks and Broncos were set to meet. Seattle had been pulling plays from Denver’s training camp clips that fans had posted on social media, which made the material publicly available.
“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 calling John Schneider.
“So he called John (Schneider) and threatened to come out publicly and do a whole Patriot, like Spygate type of thing...”
Macdonald added that 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.
A social media post shared by Ari Meirov on September 22, 2026 echoed Macdonald’s account, saying Payton threatened to accuse Seattle of a Spygate-style cheating scandal in 2024 and that the Seahawks used training camp clips found on X.
The important part, as Macdonald’s story makes clear, is that the footage was already out there. It had been posted by fans and shared online, so Seattle wasn’t sneaking around for anything hidden.
Still, it’s a wild detail to come out now, especially with Payton and the Broncos set to host Macdonald and the Seahawks in Denver for a Week 6 Thursday Night Football matchup. And this time, Seattle won’t need fan-shot training camp video to get ready. There should be plenty of film on Bo Nix and Denver from the first five weeks of the season.
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