Denver Broncos head coach Sean Payton kicked up a hornet’s nest before the season when she slammed former Broncos head coach and current New York Jets OC Nathaniel Hackett.
As the two teams prepare to play one another with a chance to get their respective seasons back on track, Payton doesn’t want to keep adding to the distraction.
“Respectfully, I feel like I’ve addressed it,” Payton told reporters regarding his Hackett comments. “[Jets coach] Robert [Saleh] did a great job of talking about it. Here’s the thing — we have two teams focused on getting their second win. I think that’s where our focus has been.”
Payton shocked a lot of people around the NFL this offseason when he completely slammed Hackett’s performance in an interview.
“It might have been one of the worst coaching jobs in the history of the NFL,” Payton said to Jarrett Bell of USA Today. “That’s how bad it was.”
He also took shots at the Jets.
“It doesn’t happen often where an NFL team or organization gets embarrassed. 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.”
The Super Bowl champion coach received a lot of backlash for the comments and apologized, saying he was still thinking like a member of the media when he said them.
You better believe the Jets want to win this game and we’ll celebrate accordingly at Payton’s expense if they do.
[PFT]
About Sean Keeley
Along with writing for Awful Announcing and The Comeback, Sean is the Managing Editor for Comeback Media. Previously, he created the Syracuse blog Troy Nunes Is An Absolute Magician and wrote 'How To Grow An Orange: The Right Way to Brainwash Your Child Into Rooting for Syracuse.' He has also written non-Syracuse-related things for SB Nation, Curbed, and other outlets. He currently lives in Seattle where he is complaining about bagels. Send tips/comments/complaints to sean@thecomeback.com.