Super Bowl 2025: Saints letting Zack Baun go before they knew what they had was worse than Giants allowing Saquon Barkley to leave

NEW ORLEANS – The team that drafted him spent a lot of capital to do so, but then couldn’t really figure out how best to allow his skills to flourish so they let him walk in free agency. Now he is a star for the Eagles, a finalist for Player of the Year, and on the verge of winning a Super Bowl that would embarrass the original team and further frustrate its already irate fanbase.

Sound familiar? For Giants fans it should. But this isn’t about Saquon Barkley and an organization whose credibility gets dragged through the dirt a little more each time a highlight of a backwards hurdle or a 78-yard playoff touchdown run in the snow comes on the screen.

It’s about Zack Baun and the one team in the league that should be watching Sunday’s game – if they can even stomach doing so — with cringes of regret deeper than Joe Schoen and John Mara will be experiencing. At least the Giants always knew Barkley was a special player, they just made the decision to allow him to leave. The Saints had no idea what they had in Baun and now he is back in their buildings, literally practicing at the Saints’ facility with the Eagles and playing Sunday in the SuperDome, with a chance to show the world what he’s become since being shown the door.

They may have agreed to terms with the Eagles on the same day, Barkley on a headline-grabbing three-year $37.75 million contract and Baun as a minor footnote with a one-year $3.5 million deal, but they aren’t quite the same. Baun isn’t the defensive equivalent of Barkley, the second overall pick in the 2018 draft and the Offensive Rookie of the Year. His trajectory, in Giants terms, is more like if Cor’Dale Flott went elsewhere to become a first-team All-Pro.

Or Julian Love. Oh wait, that actually did happen. Oops.

Baun was a third-round pick but never quite graduated from special teams contributor to defensive standout. In four years with the Saints he had 88 tackles, two sacks and one interception in 14 starts over 64 games.

This season, his first in Philadelphia, he amassed 151 tackles, five forced fumbles, four passes defended, one interception and 3.5 sacks in 16 games and starts. He is a finalist for Defensive Player of the Year.

“They were on me right away in free agency as soon as the door opened up,” Baun said of the Eagles. “They had a vision for me. They said I had an opportunity to make an impact on the team and that’s all I wanted to do.”

How did the Eagles see that when the Saints couldn’t make it work? The answer is they didn’t.

“At the floor, he was going to be the best special teams player we have,” Eagles general manager Howie Roseman said. “That’s the floor. And then we saw a player in Miami with a similar skillset and said the has a similar background, athlete, and he has that kind of upside in Vic [Fangio]’s defense.”

That player was Andrew Van Ginkel who played under Fangio last year. Van Ginkel, also a free agent at the same time as Braun, signed with the Vikings on a two-year $20 million deal. The Eagles got Baun for a third of the annual price.

The key was moving him to inside linebacker, a change that Fangio made in OTAs.

“When I was here I didn’t know what I needed,” Baun said of the Saints. “I didn’t know if I was an on- the-ball backer or an off-the-ball backer. I just knew that it didn’t feel right and maybe I wasn’t getting it right away. But time ran its course and I just continued to work on my craft and get ready for whatever opportunity came after that I could take advantage of.”

Baun – like Barkley again – seems to hold no grudges toward his former team.

“I don’t have any ill-will to New Orleans,” he said on Tuesday. “I loved it here, my son was born here, they drafted me. I owe a lot to this city.”

He even took responsibility for things not working out with the Saints.

“I blame a lot of it on myself, on my own development, on getting in my own way,” he said. “Physically I knew I had the capability to be a pretty good player but it just took me a while to get going mentally and transition from different positions on defense and try to get used to coverages, schemes, run fits, my eye fits, things like that. Physically I knew I had the tools. It was getting into the right situation and being in the right headspace to do it too.”

He found that in Philadelphia. And now he’s brought it back to New Orleans. Where it all began.

So while your stomach turns on Sunday watching your former favorite churn out yards and scamper for touchdowns and probably break the all-time single season rushing record for a hated rival on sports’ biggest stage, Giants fans, just remember that it could be worse.

Maybe not a whole lot worse, but a little bit anyway.