New Denver Broncos head coach Sean Payton ripped Nathaniel Hackett just days into his first Broncos training camp. Since then, Payton has walked back his comments about Hackett, saying he almost immediately regretted what he said. However, even if Payton knows he shouldn’t have said what he said to the media, he never said he was wrong about what he said. And that is the biggest takeaway. Payton was absolutely correct about Hackett and his horrible coaching job last season.
Sean Payton was right about Nathaniel Hackett and the Broncos last year
In an interview with Jarrett Bell of USA Today, Sean Payton completely torched his predecessor, Nathaniel Hackett.
“It doesn’t happen often where an NFL team or organization gets embarrassed, and that happened here,” Payton told Bell. “It might have been one of the worst coaching jobs in the history of the NFL. That’s how bad it was.”
Afterward, he admitted that “I had one of those moments where I still had my Fox hat on, and not my coaching hat on.”
“I needed a little bit more filter,” Payton also acknowledged. “I said what I said, and obviously, I needed a little bit more restraint, and I regret that.”
That’s all well and good, but he never said he went too far or takes back what he said about how bad Hackett was last season, and he shouldn’t. Hackett’s 15 games as Broncos head coach was one of the worst tenures in NFL history, which Payton truthfully pointed out.
Before getting into some of the specifics, let’s look at the overall results.
Hackett took over a team that went 7-10 the year before with Teddy Bridgewater, Drew Lock, and Brett Rypien at QB. That got Vic Fangio fired. The team then brought in nine-time Pro Bowl quarterback Russell Wilson, and the team got worse.
Hackett went 4-11 in his 15 games as head coach. The only full-time head coaches in the modern NFL with shorter tenures are Pete McCulley (nine games with the San Francisco 49ers in 1978) and Lou Holtz (13 games with the New York Jets in 1976), and Bobby Petrino (13 games with the Atlanta Falcons in 2007).
And while the former Broncos’ coach doesn’t qualify for the all-time win percentage list with less than a season under his belt, Hackett’s 26.7% would put him fourth-worst since the merger, only behind Hue Jackson (20.5%), Steve Spagnuolo (21.2%), and Gus Bradley (22.6%).
The numbers around the Denver offense were also brutal, especially considering Hackett got the job on the strength of his time as an offensive coordinator for the Green Bay Packers. Despite his specialty, the Broncos finished 19th or worse in the league in scoring, yards, yards per play passing yards, rushing yards, and expected points contributed (where the offense was 29th).
The only category the Broncos ranked in the top 10 in was penalties, as they were tied for second-most in the league.
So ultimately, the stats back up Payton’s claim that Hackett had “one of the worst coaching jobs in the history of the NFL.”
In football, though, numbers don’t always tell the whole story. There is also the eye test, and [spoiler alert] that wasn’t good either.
The play-calling was bad, the clock management at worse, and the stories of Russell Wilson audible-ing to his own plays all the time weren’t great. Early in the season, getting the snap off became such a problem, the Broncos fans were chanting down the play clock to help the offense. After that, Hackett hired a longtime NFL assistant, Jerry Rosburg, to be the time-management coach for the team.
And in addition to letting Wilson do whatever he wanted on the field, he allegedly got to do whatever he wanted off it as well. Stories from around the team said that Wilson’s team of trainers, coaches, and advisors ran rampant around the Broncos facility.
That’s what Payton is talking about in his USA Today interview when he said, “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.”
Nathaniel Hackett wasn’t a good head coach. He let too much go on around the field and didn’t do a good job managing what happened on it. That’s pretty much what Sean Payton said, just in a pretty harsh way that no other NFL coach would say to a member of the media. Behind closed doors? Sure. But not on the record like that.
Payton now put a target on his back both in the coaching fraternity and with the Jets — where Hackett is now the offensive coordinator — who the Broncos play in Week 5. That’s something the new Broncos coach will have to live with.
But he doesn’t have to live with being wrong.
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