Sean Payton did not hold back when talking about the former Denver Broncos head coach. In an interview with USA Today’s Sports, the current Broncos head coach went after Nathaniel Hackett and his coaching staff for the job they did with the Broncos last year. Payton said the job they did was “one of the worst coaching jobs in the history of the NFL” and there were “20 dirty hands” around quarterback Russell Wilson who was traded to the team last year after spending the previous 10 seasons with the Seattle Seahawks.
“There’s so much dirt around that,” Payton said. “There’s 20 dirty hands, for what was allowed, tolerated in the fricking training rooms, the meeting rooms. The offense. I don’t know Hackett. A lot of people had dirt on their hands. It wasn’t just Russell. He didn’t just flip. He still has it. This B.S. that he hit a wall? Shoot, they couldn’t get a play in. They were 29th in the league in pre-snap penalties on both sides of the ball.”
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The Broncos finished the 2022 season with a 5-12 record, but Hackett was fired before the season ended. He is currently the offensive coordinator for the New York Jets, and Payton also took aim and the team that has Aaron Rodgers as their starting quarterback.
“It doesn’t happen often where an NFL team or organization gets embarrassed,” Payton told USA Today. “And that happened here. Part of it was their own fault, relative to spending so much [expletive] time trying to win the offseason — the PR, the pomp and circumstance, marching people around and all this stuff.
“We’re not doing any of that. The Jets did that this year. You watch. Hard Knocks, all of it. I can see it coming. Remember when [former Washington owner] Dan Snyder put that Dream Team together? I was at the Giants [in 2000]. I was a young coach. I thought, ‘How are we going to compete with them? Deion [Sanders is] there now.’ That team won eight games or whatever. So, listen … just put the work in.”
The interesting thing about this is Broncos will face the Jets in Week 5 (Oct. 8) of the 2023 NFL season. Jets head coach Robert Saleh was asked about Payton’s comments on Thursday and said, “I’m not going acknowledge Sean. He’s been in the league for a while, he can say whatever the hell he wants. As far as what we have going on here, I kind of live by the saying, ‘If you ain’t got no haters, you ain’t popping.’ So hate away.”
