Zack Baun, Philadelphia Eagles Linebacker: Career, Stats, and the Season Nobody Saw Coming
From $3.5 Million to $51 Million in One Year
March 2024. The Philadelphia Eagles signed a linebacker named Zack Baun to a one-year, $3.5 million contract. The transaction got roughly as much coverage as a practice squad move. Defensive coordinator Vic Fangio had been on the job for six weeks. General manager Howie Roseman told him he’d picked up a cheap depth piece, someone who could play special teams and spell the starters. Fangio thought Roseman was underselling it.
One season later: 151 combined tackles, five forced fumbles, First-Team All-Pro, Pro Bowl, fifth in Defensive Player of the Year voting, a Super Bowl ring, and a three-year, $51 million extension that made Baun the fourth-highest-paid inside linebacker in the NFL. The Eagles’ defense finished ranked first overall in the league. Baun led it in tackles.
That gap – between what the contract said he was worth and what he actually produced – is the whole story.
Early Life: West Bend, Brown Deer, and Playing Everything
Baun was born December 30, 1996, in West Bend, Wisconsin. He started at West Bend East High School playing wide receiver, which is not where most future NFL linebackers begin. His family moved after his sophomore year and he transferred to Brown Deer High School, where he switched to quarterback and linebacker simultaneously.
What he did at Brown Deer is genuinely hard to categorize. He threw for 3,061 yards and 27 touchdowns in his high school career, rushed for another 3,923 yards and 67 scores. He was named Wisconsin Football Coaches Association State Offensive Player of the Year. He also started on Brown Deer’s 2013 WIAA Division II State Championship basketball team and placed in both the 100-meter and 200-meter sprints at the state track meet. As a younger kid he played soccer as a goalkeeper, played tennis, did ballet.
The range matters later. When Fangio eventually asked Baun to line up at multiple alignments – sometimes on the edge, sometimes off the ball, dropping into coverage on one snap and blitzing through the A-gap on the next – Baun’s answer was that playing every sport as a kid trained him for exactly that kind of positional shapeshifting. “Being overall athletic really has helped me do a lot of different things,” he said before Super Bowl LIX. “I think it helps Vic scheme some stuff up, too.”
Wisconsin and the Foot That Kept Breaking
Baun committed to Wisconsin intending to grayshirt his freshman year. He broke his left foot going into the season and redshirted. Appeared in 12 games as a redshirt freshman, making 15 tackles. Then broke the same foot again during spring practice of his redshirt sophomore year and missed the entire 2017 season.
Two serious injuries to the same foot before his third year of college. The scouts who later knocked him down draft boards had a real reason.
He returned as a starter at outside linebacker his redshirt junior year, third on the Badgers in tackles. His final season, 2019, was the one that got him drafted: 12.5 sacks, enough to make him one of the most productive pass-rushing linebackers in the country. The Saints used the 74th pick on him. That’s not a bad pick – third round, middle of day two – but the foot history kept him from going higher.
Four Seasons in New Orleans: The Mismatch Nobody Fixed
From 2020 through 2023, Baun played 62 games for the Saints and accumulated 88 combined tackles. Total. Not per season – across four years. He logged fewer than 700 snaps on defense across that entire stretch. The Saints used him primarily on special teams and as a rotational pass rusher, slotting him at outside linebacker when he played defense at all.
The numbers are almost comically thin for a third-round pick. But Baun doesn’t frame New Orleans as the organization failing him. He puts it on himself. “I blame a lot of it on myself and my own development,” he said at Super Bowl week in New Orleans. “Getting in my own way. I had great coaches. It was a great scheme. But I kind of blame myself.” He spent 1,293 snaps on special teams across those four years. It would’ve been easy to settle into that. Some guys spend a decade in the league chasing kicks and punts and cash checks. Baun kept believing the pass-rusher who had 12.5 sacks his last year at Madison was still in there somewhere.
He just needed someone to deploy him differently.
What Vic Fangio Saw on Tape
Fangio doesn’t evaluate players with a checklist. He said so explicitly when asked about Baun in November 2024. “You just watch the tape, watch the movement patterns, watch the player play.” He had done this before – with Andrew Van Ginkel in Miami, where he convinced a pass-rushing edge player that there was more to his game than rushing the passer. Van Ginkel eventually told Baun before the 2024 season that Fangio gets creative with coverage looks in ways he’d never seen. Different from anything either of them had experienced.
What Fangio saw in Baun’s movement patterns was an inside linebacker. Not an edge rusher. Not a special teamer. The way Baun tracked the ball, the way he changed direction, the way his hips moved in space – Fangio decided the Saints had been playing him wrong. Roseman expected a backup. Fangio plugged him into the starting lineup at inside linebacker from the beginning of training camp.
Pro Football Focus grades Baun second among NFL linebackers in pass coverage through the first ten weeks of 2024, behind only Fred Warner of San Francisco, who had won three All-Pro honors at that point. Baun’s coverage grade for the full season ended at 91.6 – more than three points above the next-best linebacker. His overall PFF grade hit 90.1, first among all linebackers in the league. The Saints had him playing roughly 150 snaps per year on defense. The Eagles played him on 99 percent of their defensive snaps.
Everything didn’t fully click until the Week 5 bye. Baun said as much. Mentally, he was still catching up – learning coverages, run fits, eye progressions, how the scheme communicated. “I knew physically I had the capability to be a pretty good player,” he said. “It was just getting in the right situation and being in the right head space to do it.” After the bye, the Eagles won 15 of their next 16 games.
The 2024 Regular Season by the Numbers
151 combined tackles across 16 regular season games. That’s the number. It’s not just high – it’s historically rare. Only two players since 2000 finished a season with 150-plus tackles and five-plus forced fumbles: Baun and the Colts’ Zaire Franklin, who did it the same year. Baun also added 3.5 sacks, 13 tackles for loss, five quarterback hits, and one interception.
He ranked 11th in the NFL in tackles through Week 10, first on the Eagles, and nearly every player above him on the list still had their bye week remaining. The forced fumble against Dyami Brown in the NFC Championship turned a competitive game into a blowout. His strip-sack of Baker Mayfield in the regular season – a 12-yard loss that pushed Tampa Bay into a field goal attempt – was the kind of play that doesn’t appear in a standard box score for a linebacker.
Three Pro Bowl selections, three DPOY finalists, and three All-Pro picks had been made at linebacker that year. Baun finished first-team on all of them. PFF named him their 2024 Breakout Player of the Year. The Eagles’ defense, which had been shaky entering the season with multiple new pieces, finished ranked first overall in total defense. Baun and Nakobe Dean were the reason the middle held.
Super Bowl LIX: Back in New Orleans
The Super Bowl was played in New Orleans. The same city where Baun spent four years watching other players get snaps he thought he deserved. He ran into old equipment managers and athletic trainers from his Saints days in the hallways leading up to the game. He said he harbored no hard feelings. You can decide what to make of that.
In the game itself, Baun dove to secure an interception off Patrick Mahomes that became one of the defining defensive plays of the Eagles’ 40-22 win. He was also wearing the green dot for the first time in his career – the signal-caller in the middle of the defense, relaying Fangio’s calls in real time. When Nakobe Dean tore his patellar tendon against Green Bay in the Wild Card, Baun had to absorb that role immediately. He called it seamless. Fangio probably called it expected. Baun added 26 combined tackles across three playoff games.
Final career totals entering 2025: 239 combined tackles, 153 solo, 9 sacks, one Super Bowl ring.
The $51 Million Contract and the 2025 Restructure
Baun re-signed with Philadelphia in March 2025 on a three-year, $51 million deal. Fourth-highest-paid inside linebacker in the NFL. The first year – 2025 – carried $17 million in fully earned money. He said he didn’t want to leave. “What we built here, the culture here… I was just a piece of the puzzle that was put into a great culture already established.”
In May 2025, roughly two months after the deal was signed, the Eagles restructured it. The rework converted the arrangement so that 2026 functions as a real contract year – meaning if the Eagles choose to release Baun after the 2026 season via a post-June 1 designation, the cap hit softens considerably. He has $17 million in cash due in 2027 and 2028 under the original structure; the restructure gives the team an exit if they want one.
This is standard NFL cap management, not a sign the Eagles are moving on. Teams do this constantly with mid-range deals to preserve flexibility two years out. Baun hasn’t missed a game, hasn’t said anything that suggests friction, and went on to earn his second straight Pro Bowl selection in 2025. The restructure is worth knowing about because it changes his contract calculus in 2026 – but reading it as a vote of no confidence in him specifically would be a stretch.
The 2025 Season: Still Leading, Still Every Snap
Baun led the Eagles in tackles for the second consecutive season in 2025. His total dropped from 151 to 123 combined – partly because the Eagles’ defense was deeper, partly because they played a different style of game in certain matchups. He added two interceptions, including one off Kenny Pickett on the opening drive of the second half in a 31-0 win over the Raiders. He tied for fifth on the team in sacks with 3.5. He earned his second Pro Bowl nod.
He played 99 percent of the team’s defensive snaps again. That’s not an accident – it reflects Fangio’s decision to treat Baun as a true every-down player rather than a situational one, which is the opposite of how the Saints deployed him. The Eagles gave up the ball more in 2025 than they did in their Super Bowl run, which means some of those tackle opportunities just weren’t there. His per-game production didn’t fall off the cliff the tackle number might suggest.
Two straight Pro Bowls, two straight seasons leading the Eagles in tackles, one Super Bowl, 99 percent snap rate. The debate about whether 2024 was a fluke is over. It wasn’t.
What the Numbers Don’t Show
Baun wore the green dot all season in 2025. That’s the helmet with the radio transmitter – the player who receives the defensive call from Fangio and relays it to everyone else before the snap. It requires processing the call, reading the formation, communicating the adjustment, and getting everyone lined up correctly, often in under ten seconds against a hurrying offense. It’s the kind of responsibility that gets handed to players coaches trust completely, not just players who make tackles.
He also talks about the role differently than most players do. In a conversation with NFL Network before the 2025 season, he broke down how his career trajectory – the Saints years, the position change, the mental work of learning Fangio’s coverage language – shaped how he communicates on the field now. The four years in New Orleans that looked like a dead end turned out to be the base he built everything on. He learned coverages badly, got confused, figured out what he didn’t understand, and eventually got to Philadelphia already knowing what the wrong version of himself looked like.
Fangio said at some point during the 2024 season: “He knows what you do well and he puts you in the best positions to help the defense.” That’s Baun describing Fangio. But it reads just as cleanly the other way.
Comments