The Sweep, September 23 — Sean Payton's Cheating Phone Call Leaks, Arch Manning Apologises, and the CFTC Polices Words the President Might Say

Wednesday, September 23 — the phone call Denver made, and the tape Seattle didn't mean to release.

Mike Macdonald sat down with Graham Bensinger and, believing a portion of it was off the record, described a 2024 phone call in which Broncos head coach Sean Payton rang Seahawks general manager John Schneider and threatened to publicly accuse Seattle of cheating. Payton's theory, per Macdonald, was a "Patriot Spygate" situation, possibly seeded by someone from Macdonald's Michigan past. Seattle's answer was that if Denver went public, Seattle would sue. Payton never went public. The clip did.

Here is the detail that turns this from a scandal into a comedy: the footage Seattle is alleged to have improperly used was Broncos training-camp video that Denver's own social accounts had posted. Watching a team's public content is not espionage. It is being online. Macdonald apologised at his Wednesday press conference for airing it at all, which is the correct instinct and does nothing to unring the bell.

Tuesday, September 22 — Arch Manning apologises, and Holly Rowe accepts.

We covered the setup in yesterday's column and deliberately declined to adjudicate it. The resolution is worth carrying. At Monday's press conference Manning was asked about the AI-fabricated video showing Steve Sarkisian slapping ESPN's Holly Rowe, and said: "That's a good one. Of him slapping Holly Rowe? It's hilarious." On Tuesday he posted an apology to Instagram Stories — "There is nothing funny about it… I do not take that lightly and am deeply sorry for that" — and apologised directly to Rowe.

Rowe replied on X that she appreciated a conversation between them that would stay private, accepted the apology, and wanted to "move forward with respect and kindness." ESPN declined to comment. The Association for Women in Sports Media asked programmes to remind players and staff that women in sports media deserve respect.

The underlying video is a fabrication depicting violence against a named working journalist, generated from a real sideline moment after Texas beat Ohio State 24-23 on September 12. Sarkisian said on September 17 that he could have handled the actual interview "with a little bit more patience." Nobody involved did anything worse than the technology did, and Rowe is the only person in this story who has had to be gracious about it.

Wednesday, September 23 — the federal government now has a policy on what the President might say.

The CFTC's Division of Market Oversight issued a staff advisory holding that "mention markets" — contracts settling on whether a named person says a word, attends a thing, or appears in a photograph — carry "a heightened risk of manipulation." Exchanges now have to show their homework before listing one.

Scale check: those markets traded roughly $1.8 million on Wednesday. Sports contracts on Kalshi did about $408 million the same day. The regulator built a bespoke pre-clearance regime for half a per cent of the problem, which tells you something about where it has a clean enforcement record and where it has a lawsuit. We have a full piece on what that convergence means.

Wednesday, September 23 — 97 per cent of one thing.

Jaxson Dart's season ended in surgery. BetMGM moved the Giants' playoff price from +165 to +650, and disclosed that 97 per cent of its Giants playoff futures tickets were on yes and 71 per cent of the win-total money was over 8.5. Jameis Winston went 11-of-27 for 111 yards on Monday night.

There is no joke here, just a very expensive illustration of what happens when an entire market is a bet on one player staying healthy.

Wednesday, September 23 — the Senate Banking Committee argues about furniture.

Republicans met Kalshi CEO Tarek Mansour privately at 10 a.m. All seven committee Democrats signed a letter the same day demanding the conversation happen in public instead — "not behind closed doors in a Republican-only, industry-friendly roundtable." Elizabeth Warren leads the signatories. It is a procedural fight and also, we'd argue, a strategic error by the company that accepted the invitation.

Week of September 21 — three players appeal, and one number stands out.

Sam Franklin was fined $9,425 for a blindside block. Evan Williams got $7,087 for a hit on a defenseless player. Chris Johnson was hit for $17,911 for a hip-drop tackle. All three have appealed, and all three fines count toward possible suspensions under the league's five flagged safety rules.

Johnson's fine is roughly double Williams' for a technique that is banned outright rather than situationally illegal. That is the league pricing the hip-drop as its current priority, and it is a clearer signal of enforcement intent than anything in a memo.

Saturday, September 26 — the best regular-season Saturday in three years.

Six Top 25 matchups, the most in any regular-season week since 2023, four of them in the SEC. No. 1 Texas travels to No. 14 Tennessee for the first meeting between the programmes since the 1969 Cotton Bowl. No. 23 Texas A&M is at No. 10 LSU, No. 20 Oregon at No. 12 USC, No. 17 Iowa at No. 18 Michigan.

Texas has not played a true road game yet this season. That is the single most useful fact on the slate.

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What we are not running, and why

Giannis Antetokounmpo to the Heat. It surfaced high in a Tuesday NBA search written in the present tense, and it is a genuine blockbuster — Antetokounmpo and Bobby Portis to Miami for Tyler Herro, Kel'el Ware, Jaime Jaquez Jr., Kasparas Jakučionis, the No. 13 pick, unprotected firsts in 2031 and 2033, a 2030 swap and a 2033 second. It closed on July 6, around the draft. It is eleven weeks old. This is the sixth consecutive edition in which a correctly-described, wrongly-dated story reached our research stage.

"Kawhi Leonard agrees to a two-year, $115m extension with Toronto." Appeared in the same aggregated summary as the Giannis item. We could not find a primary account of it anywhere, and the framing conflicts with what we do know about his situation. We are not printing a contract figure we cannot source to a single openable page.

The US Open influencer ring-light row. Real, and genuinely interesting on the etiquette question. The tournament ended weeks ago and the clip is being recirculated, not broken. Recycled outrage.

Kei'Trel Clark's eyeblack fine. We ran it, with Azeez Al-Shaair's, in the September 22 column. Not running it twice because it is still trending.

Two numbers from the Kalshi margin filing. Search summaries carry a "45-day review period" and a "99 per cent per-side coverage standard with a one-day liquidation window." Neither appears on any page we were able to open, and a clearing house's margin methodology is exactly the sort of procedural detail this column does not take from a snippet. Our piece on the filing says so in the text rather than quietly omitting it.

The Block's report on the Senate letter. It is the outlet that broke it and it returned 403 to us three separate ways. We sourced the item from two other accounts we could actually read, and the direct quote in this column comes from the one that carried it in full.