The NFL offseason and free agency are almost upon us, and with that, we wait in anticipation for the New Orleans Saints to make a head coaching hire to kick things off. After a brutal 5-12 campaign in 2024, there are many ways to distribute the blame amongst the organization. One of the notable issues for the Saints the past few seasons has been letting players walk who they mismanaged, and then they turned out to be good shortly after.
One such player is linebacker Zack Baun, who the Saints let walk in the 2024 offseason, as he would move on to the now Super Bowl bound Philadelphia Eagles. With that in mind, let’s take a look at the decision to let him walk and his production to this point in his career.
Free agent contract
Zack Baun received a one-year deal with the Eagles in the 2024 offseason, with a total value of $3.5 million and a guaranteed salary worth $1.125 million. He also earned an additional $1 million in incentives for his level of play, and likely for the Super Bowl berth.
With this being only a one-year deal, the Eagles will have a tough decision to make on whether or not they want to pay him his new value for the long term, or let him walk to a new team.
Snap counts
The snap counts for Baun tell the story quite well, and his utilization has been quite low until he joined Philadelphia. Here is his defensive snap rates for each season, only including games he played:
- 2020: 8% (82)
- 2021: 17% (194)
- 2022: 10% (83)
- 2023: 27% (301)
- 2024: 95% (939)
2024 season review
2024 was not only a breakout year for Baun, it was a year where he finally got a full opportunity to get substantial playing time, and he made the most of it. He wrapped up the regular season with a whopping 151 total tackles (93 solo, 58 assisted), 11 tackles for loss, 5 forced fumbles with one recovery, 4 pass deflections, 3.5 sacks, and an interception.
This type of season was not only unprecedented but enormously impressive, with the Eagles finding a way to utilize him correctly, he was able to put up defensive player of the year type numbers.
Report card grade
When it comes to grading a team for letting players walk, it typically is hard to gauge the factor of whether or not the player in question would have performed at a similar level with that team and not their new team. Who knows if Zack Baun would have ever had a breakout season with the Saints, especially at that level.
Regardless, he had an outstanding season, and when it comes down to it, letting a DPOY candidate walk is going to reflect extremely poorly on your team. This is an F in pretty much every sense of how the grading scale could be applied, as the Saints chose to never utilize him this often, and now it will bite them for years to come.