The Denver Broncos got completely dismantled by the Miami Dolphins on Sunday, giving up 70 points a week after blowing a big lead and losing to the Washington Commanders at home. Broncos head coach Sean Payton clearly wasn’t in the mood to deal with many questions from the media afterwards, lashing out at a local reporter who tried to get Payton to expound on the historical significance of the loss.
On Stokely & Josh on 104.3 The Fan on Monday, hosts Brandon Stokely and Josh Dover took issue with Payton’s handling of questions from local media.
“You can be upset, and I understand why you would be upset,” Dover said. “I want you to stand up there and be angry. You should’ve been angry after that game.”
Dover called Payton’s interaction with the reporter childish, which echoed ESPN’s Ryan Clark on Get Up that same morning. Josh felt like Payton owed more to himself, the team and the press corps to not be so harsh.
“You’re the adult in the room. You got to stand up there and take it,” Dover said. “You kept Russell Wilson in the game to take it for four full quarters, right? So why don’t you do the same thing you’re asking your 22 starters to do? You stand up there, you take it like a man, and you tell everybody what went wrong and you answer all the crappy questions that you don’t think you should have to answer.”
Stokely agreed that Payton needed to show some maturity in that situation. But he thought it was further evidence that Payton views the local media covering the team as a lower class compared to national writers and team reporters.
“He’s treated the local media differently,” Stokely said. “You don’t get passes when you come in and you try to change everything and you treat the local media one way but the national media another way. You’re their best friend. They can have full access, whatever they want, whatever they need they got. Local media now, we’ve been relegated and all of a sudden everything looks different than in the past. And the performance was awful.”
Stokely added that Payton has held local media in a different regard ever since he was hired to be the Broncos head coach. He felt like had it not been a local reporter asking that same question, Payton would have acted differently.
“You don’t need to fire back at the reporter like that,” he said. “It’s uncalled for, it’s unnecessary, but I can promise you this. If that was a national reporter, if that was Seth Wickersham or Jarrett Bell, he wouldn’t have answered it like that. I can promise you that. And that’s what pisses me off. And I’m still a Sean Payton fan, but he’s pissing me off a little bit with this stuff. He is.”
