As fans of a heavily censored league, we love to get whatever insider scoop we can from the NFL. Earlier this week, Graham Bensinger, or his team, delivered that gift. 

The story begins two years ago, as Mike Macdonald made his head coaching debut with the Seattle Seahawks against the legendary head coach Sean Payton debuting for the Denver Broncos. Before halftime, the hosts caught a lead and never looked back. But call it pride or intuition, Payton could not digest the loss. Turns out, he was not being a sore loser. Well… not exactly. And just a few days ago, Macdonald served us a story of a would-be legal case from 2024 on a silver platter that never saw daylight, forcing him to now apologize for how the dirty laundry got aired.

“It’s something I didn’t intend for public use,” Macdonald said on Wednesday, as reported by Zac Stevens of the Denver Broncos on X. “But I felt like it was the most appropriate thing to reach out to Sean and really just apologize to him for having that end up be public, where it wasn’t meant to.

“It’s a lesson learned, honestly. I’m responsible for what I say no matter the circumstance. I fell short in that moment. It stings for me, frankly, but it’s something that I’m definitely going to learn from. It’s a good example that we got to take responsibility for the things that we say.”

In a recent sit-down interview on ‘In depth with Graham Bensinger’, a clip of Macdonald and the host talking leaked out. From the angle of the camera, you could see that it wasn’t on record, and so it was never supposed to be seen by the public. But who could resist giving out a juicy story like this?

In the clip, Macdonald tells Bensinger off the record that they had taken over a hundred clips from the Broncos’ training camp practice open to fans — who, obviously, shared those on their social media. But when Payton got to know of it by mid-season, his temper flared.

Macdonald shut down Payton before things went to court

Under the NFL’s rules, teams are not allowed to record their opponents to learn about them. They can, however, use publicly available clips to create strategies however they like.

“He called ‘Johnny’, basically, threatened to come out publicly and do a whole Patriot, like, spygate type of thing,” Macdonald had told Bensinger in confidence. “I’m sitting like, ‘Oh my god, we didn’t cheat.’ They thought it was a Michigan thing where we had planted the whole thing.”

But luckily, Macdonald had the perfect response for Payton.

“We had to counter with him and say, ‘If you come out with this, we’re going to sue you because it’s not true.’ The season ends, and he let it go.”

That was the very point Bill Belichick made when the New England Patriots were held guilty in the Spygate Scandal. But you can also look at Payton’s reaction being so because he was a veteran who lost to a rookie making his debut as an NFL head coach and, as Tom Brady called it, they became the guilty parties because they were a stronger, better team that others could not defeat. Now, while we won’t get into the NCAA’s Michigan case, Macdonald did learn his lesson.

The thing is, whether the two parties have agreed to keep something off the record, Macdonald learned the hard way that you should simply not air your dirty laundry to anyone, even if it is a reputable reporter. More importantly, you should certainly not do it when your mic on an interview show is on, and the cameras are rolling. But apparently, everything has and had cooled down between the two coaches.

Sean Payton had moved on already before commenting on Mike Macdonald’s latest slip-up

Interestingly, as head coaches, Payton and Macdonald meet each other multiple times, and not just in the regular season. The NFL holds league meetings, and then there is the NFL Combine in Indiana. Funny enough, Macdonald realized that everything was A-okay between the two in Indy itself.

“I went for a run at the Combine, and I’m literally getting out of the elevator at the Marriott there in Indy. As soon as I open the door at the floor that I’m at, he comes, and I was kinda like over him. And he comes and goes, ‘Hey coach!’ Totally backed out in the moment. And I was like, ‘Oh man!’ It was great.”

Interestingly, the two did not meet last season, but were projected to meet as Super Bowl opponents before the eventual finalists, the Patriots, ended the Broncos’ season. As we know, the Seahawks went on to win the big one. But the Broncos will host them at Mile High in Week 6, hoping to avenge that 26-20 loss two years ago. Before that could happen, though, Payton did react to Macdonald’s latest slip-up.

“I respect the heck out of him and his program, always have. He’s a phenomenal football coach; it’s been great to get to know him at the owners’ meetings over the last couple of years,” Macdonald said. “He was awesome.

“I know we’re both looking forward to moving forward from it. I really appreciate how he handled it.”

Meanwhile, Macdonald called the 2024 scenario a “cold war” where both parties threatened to press the button but never did. The former Michigan Wolverines DC (2021) also said he respects Payton and declined to speculate about how the private conversation ultimately became public. He called that part of the situation “not important.” What’s important is that Payton could totally give his actual answer to Macdonald as the two meet in Week 6.