​Is using open-source footage off the internet to scout an NFL opponent cheating?Sean Payton thinks so.The Denver Broncos coach accused Mike Macdonald of cheating during the then-36-year-old Macdonald’s first season as Seahawks coach in 2024. That was Macdonald’s first year as a head coach at any level.Macdonald’s first Seahawks game that debut year was against Payton’s Broncos.Journalist Graham Bensinger, host of the syndicated show In Depth with Graham Bensinger, recently released a full, approximately 90-minute interview with Macdonald. It was one-on-one with the Super Bowl-champion coach at Macdonald’s home on 10 acres in the Seattle suburbs.Since then, Bensinger and his show have been releasing excerpts online to promote the show, mostly from the main interview. That included Macdonald saying his first few months as Seahawks coach in 2024 was the toughest time of his life.“I was sick. ….It was, like, paralyzing. It was hard to move. It’s even hard to, like, get out of bed,” Macdonald told Bensinger in the main interview.Separate from that is an excerpt Bensinger and his show released online this week. In it, technical support people are seen walking around. A camera records from a distance. It was apparent by the setup and the scene that the full interview that eventually aired had yet to begin.Macdonald is casually talking. Seemingly by way of ice-breaking with Bensinger before the main, question-and-answer interview, the coach tells what he calls “a funny story about Sean Payton and me.”“He’s not my biggest fan,” Macdonald says on the excerpt.“Fans watch. You know, fans will, like, tape or, like, post plays from training camp on Twitter. So it’s, like, public knowledge,” Macdonald said.“So we took, like, 100 plays from their training camp.”Macdonald laughed.“We’re, like, scouting them,” he said.“He (Payton) got wind of it. And he, like, lost it. It’s like the middle of the season. And we won the game.”A league source told The News Tribune Tuesday that Macdonald believed this part of his sit-down with Bensinger would not be aired publicly.Macdonald said Payton called Seahawks general manager John Schneider, and threatened to “come out publicly, do like a whole Patriots Spygate type of thing.”“I’m sitting there, like, ‘Oh, my God! We didn’t cheat!’” Macdonald said.Macdonald said Payton thought “we had a plant” at Broncos training camp that year.“So we had to, like, counter with him to say, ‘Hey, look, if you come out with this, we’re gonna sue, because it’s not true,” Macdonald told Bensigner.“So he backed down. But he was killing John, our GM. John was like, ‘Did you…?’“’No.’ I was like, ‘What are you, crazy? We’re not…that’s not how we do business,’ you know?”Macdonald said Payton let it go after the 2024 season ended.“It was like the Cold War,” Macdonald said. “He was, like, ‘I’m gonna hit the button (to launch nuclear weapon