Sean Payton Nukes Ex-Broncos HC Nathaniel Hackett From Orbit
Now that the offseason is essentially over, Denver Broncos head coach Sean Payton is on the warpath. On Wednesday, Payton 'rebuked' the NFL for its harsh punishment on Eyioma Uwazurike, and on Thursday, he took aim at Nathaniel Hackett and, perhaps inadvertently, GM George Paton.
If you were a ball boy last year at Broncos HQ, Payton's got some words for you, although he went to great lengths to defend Russell Wilson. In yet another piece from USA Today's Jarrett Bell, Payton unloaded on Hackett, starting from the position of defending Wilson.
“They can only beat the (expletive) out of you so much," Payton said via Bell. "But everybody’s got a little stink on their hands. It’s not just Russell. It was a (poor) offensive line. It might have been one of the worst coaching jobs in the history of the NFL. That’s how bad it was.
“Everything I heard about last season, we’re doing the opposite.”
Payton didn't stop there. He seems to be disgusted by how the Broncos comported themselves last offseason.
“It doesn’t happen often where an NFL team or organization gets embarrassed,” Payton said via Bell. “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’s (Sanders) there now.’ That team won eight games or whatever. So, listen…just put the work in.”
Payton's true opinion on the ultimate question of whether Wilson is washed has finally come to the surface. The veteran coach has danced around it here and there since taking over in Denver, but in this one-on-one with Bell, for whatever reason, Payton dug deep and sounded off on how the Broncos mishandled Wilson last year under Hackett.
“Oh, man,” Payton said via Bell. “There’s so much dirt around that. 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.”
Broncos fans can painfully remember those moments, especially early in the 2022 season when Hackett seemed oblivious to the play clock, and Wilson seemed helpless in the huddle. It was bad enough that the Broncos forced Hackett to hire a coach to help him figure out how to, as Payton says, "get a play in."
But when it comes to the wildly incompetent Hackett, what did the Broncos expect when they hired a guy as head coach who brought in other people to coach him on how to do his job? Yeah, that happened, and I'm not talking about Jerry Rosburg.
But in Payton's wrath, even his current partner in the Broncos front office wasn't spared. While George Paton has fallen on the sword for his role in the Hackett hire, he likely won't take kindly to reading this little passage in Bell's story where Payton is explaining how Wilson went from being a nine-time Pro Bowler in 10 years in Seattle to one of the worst starting QBs in the NFL.
“That wasn’t his fault,” Payton said of Wilson. “That was the parents who allowed it. That’s not an incrimination on him, but an incrimination on the head coach, the GM, the president, and everybody else who watched it all happen.
“Now, a quarterback having an office and a place to watch film is normal. But all those things get magnified when you’re losing. And that other stuff, I’ve never heard of it. We’re not doing that.”
Payton is speaking to his moratorium on allowing Wilson's private coaching entourage unfettered access to Broncos HQ, as Hackett suffered last year. But Payton's not wrong about the office. It is a common occurrence for NFL teams to give their starting quarterback his own office to watch film, especially the more established signal callers.
At the end of the day, Payton's timing on these bombshell comments is curious. After mandating his team be "anonymous donors" this offseason, staying out of the limelight and just doing the work, as well as severely limiting media access to players and coaches, he obliterated that precedent by nuking Hackett —and anyone associated with him last year — from orbit.
But nothing Payton said was wrong. Let's hope he's not wrong about this, either:
“I’m going to be pissed off if this is not a playoff team,” Payton said via Bell.
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