Tag: NFL Playoffs

He’s the first first-team, All-Pro linebacker from the Eagles since Jeremiah Trotter in 2000, and he might become the first multiple All-Pro linebacker since 1975 when voting results are announced soon.

He’s the first Pro Bowl linebacker from the Eagles since Trotter in 2005.

Yet most football fans in Philadelphia don’t appreciate how good Zack Baun is.

What’s worse, most football fans outside of Philadelphia don’t even know who Zack Baun is — at least, not beyond a painfully cute social media post and his involvement in one of the worst injuries of the 2025 season.

But here’s the reality.

For the entirety of two seasons Baun has been the best football player on the best roster in Eagles history. Better than future Hall of Famers Saquon Barkley and A.J. Brown. Better than young defenders Quinyon Mitchell and Jalen Carter.

“Absolutely,” said veteran defensive lineman Brandon Graham. “And I’m thankful for him.”

Still, as I drove south on I-95 a couple of days ago, my passenger, a native fan who regularly watches the Eagles, saw a billboard outside Lincoln Financial Field promoting Sunday’s playoff game against the 49ers. The artwork was simply one player, bareheaded and in high definition, his mouth open in a celebratory scream.

My passenger said, “Who’s that?”

It was Zack Baun. The best linebacker in football over the last two seasons. The man tasked Sunday with covering and tackling Christian McCaffrey, the best offensive player in football, and George Kittle, the league’s best tight end.

In a city that still worships linebackers like Chuck Bednarik, Seth Joyner, and Bill Bergey, Baun somehow remains largely anonymous.

Maybe the reason is that Baun arrived in the NFL, and then in Philly, without fanfare.

The Saints drafted him in the third round in 2020 but never developed him. The Eagles signed him to a modest, $3.5 million prove-it deal in 2024. He proved so much so fast that the Eagles pursued him over Josh Sweat and Milton Williams, other top Eagles defenders who became free agents. They re-signed Baun to a three-year, $51 million extension and hoped he’d stay hungry.

He’s ravenous.

“He’s still working,” Graham said. “Got that chip on his shoulder.”

The result: Baun’s play and his production have been the most consistent element on a team that won the Super Bowl last season and repeated as NFC East champions this season.

He’s simply their best.

And it’s not particularly close.

On the map

In a world of shameless self-promoters, Baun is a mild-mannered, soft-spoken, shaven-headed Wisconsinite whose closely clipped goatee gives him the air of an affable extra on a pirate movie. He has 154,000 Instagram followers, 100,000 fewer than kicker Jake Elliott. Baun’s social media posts could have been drawn by Norman Rockwell.

For one of the league’s top-10 defenders, his modesty is as remarkable as his ascent.

After converting from quarterback to linebacker at Wisconsin, Baun was a part-time player in New Orleans, where he thrived on special teams as he was trying to make a mark as an outside linebacker and pass rusher.

In 2024, Vic Fangio’s first season as Eagles defensive coordinator, the coaches and GM Howie Roseman believed Baun would fit well into the Birds’ scheme. They were right. Baun excelled.

“He kind of burst onto the scene to the outside world,” coach Nick Sirianni said.

But at the same time Carter exploded as a defensive tackle, Mitchell and Cooper DeJean instantly became the best cornerback tandem in football, and Barkley set a rushing record (including playoffs). Even after the defense dominated the Chiefs in Super Bowl LIX, Baun was overshadowed. He intercepted Patrick Mahomes, but then, so did DeJean, who ran his back for a touchdown.

The two incidents that brought Baun’s existence to light for most folks who exist outside of sports Twitter had little to do with his play.

After the Eagles won the NFC championship in a rout of the Commanders, Baun gained worldwide fame when millions of people viewed a viral social media post of his toddler son Elian playing with confetti on the turf at Lincoln Financial Field.

Then, on Oct. 26, Baun tackled Giants rookie Cam Skattebo, who suffered a dislocated ankle and broken fibula. The combination of Skattebo’s rising stardom, his brutal running style, the fact that he plays for a marquee team in a marquee city, and the simmering controversy surrounding “hip-drop” tackles thrust Baun into an uneasy spotlight.

Baun was neither penalized on the play nor fined by the NFL afterward, but that isn’t the issue here. The issue is, we’re witnessing greatness, and we’d better start paying closer attention.

Top grades

Due to how they are used — Do they cover? Do they blitz? — and where they line up — Are they inside, outside, on the defensive line? — the performance of linebackers is difficult to quantify. Regardless, Baun has great numbers both objectively — raw stats — and subjectively, as graded by websites like Pro Football Focus.

He had 3½ sacks this season and last, and each season only five linebackers had more. He had one interception last season and added two more in the playoffs; his first against Green Bay in the wild-card game, then the pick in the Super Bowl. He had two more interceptions this season, which tied for fifth among linebackers.

His PFF grade last season of 90.1 ranked No. 1. His grade this season, 83.9, is No. 2 among linebackers who played at least 900 snaps.

It’s a solid showing, but the grade doesn’t really reflect Baun’s improvement.

“Last year was a lot of willy-nilly out there, honestly,” Baun said. “Of course, I did some amazing things, but I think I’m doing a better job overall this year.”

This is a sensitive issue, since the biggest question regarding Baun becoming an every-down ’backer involved his ability to cover.

PFF rated him the No. 1 coverage linebacker in both 2024 and 2025.

Question answered. Next test: McCaffrey, Kittle, and 49ers head coach Kyle Shanahan, whose pre-snap trickery is as befuddling as any coach’s in the last decade.

Baun is as ready as he’ll ever be.

Asked in which areas he’d improved most from last year to this, he replied, “Play recognition.”

And then?

“Definitely, in my cover stuff. I saw that as a strength of mine last year, and I wanted to make it even better. Footwork. Route identification.”

And, of course, practice.

Five hundred shots

Improvement has become something of an obsession for Baun. When the last whistle sounds for a regular practice, Sirianni, frustrated hooper, offers players the chance for extra work, Steph Curry style.

“It’s what we call 500 shots,” Baun said of the on-field routine after practice. “Coach describes it as a basketball player hitting 500 shots before he leaves.”

That’s where Baun drills his feet and hips and shoulders.

“It’s mostly footwork stuff, because I’m asked to do a lot of stuff in coverage — a lot of different coverage responsibilities,” Baun said. “I’m asked to cover a lot of ground and take away a lot of different zones. So my footwork really has to be on point.”

Reps matter, both during the week and on game day. He hasn’t missed a game since he became a starter in 2024. This is one of the reasons he should be considered the Eagles’ best defender, if not their best player. Carter’s the only defender who has made as many plays, but he has missed time this season.

“He’s played more than anybody these last two years,” Sirianni acknowledged, “but, like, he just keeps getting better and better and better.”

Another reason Baun should be considered the top Eagle:

Unlike Mitchell and DeJean, who also have not missed a game, Baun hasn’t had a steady sidekick. Fellow starter Nakobe Dean was lost to injury with two regular-season games to play in 2024 and did not play in the playoffs. Dean has missed seven games so far this season.

So there you have Baun. He’s an iron-man linebacker who stacks sacks and picks and grades out among the best in the business, but he seems to get so little credit.

For Baun, the winning is enough.

For most of professional football’s history, few people among the millions who tuned in every Sunday and every Monday night actually understood what was happening on the field. There was a quarterback, of course, dashing and rugged, the clear leader. There were collisions of giant bodies. There were smaller, faster men with a ballet dancer’s flexibility and a sprinter’s speed who made breathtaking plays. But no one really knew how those men freed themselves, or were freed, to make those plays. How did anyone get open? Who was supposed to block that blitzing linebacker?

This is a newer, more informed era. This is the era of All-22 film, available to everyone, showing everything. This is the era of the next-level analyst, the football-aholic who grinds tape, the mind who can demystify an entire sport for you. Which means that, when it comes to NFL coaches, this is the era of the great play-caller, the great play-designer, the great scheme-creator, the brilliant and beautiful brain. The players are more than just athletes with distinct strengths and roles and personalities. They are clusters of pixels on a screen, moving as if drawn by a magnet on a particular route to a particular spot on the field.

Kyle Shanahan, the head coach of the San Francisco 49ers, whom the Eagles face Sunday in the NFC wild-card round, is considered one of these savants. He is a terrific coach in just about every regard, having guided the 49ers to two Super Bowls and two other appearances in the NFC championship game. But it is in his creativity and orchestration of the team’s offense where he is truly elite.

Shanahan calls all the 49ers’ plays, and his offense is so quarterback-friendly that the team has reached those two Super Bowls and four NFC title games with Jimmy Garoppolo, who backed up Tom Brady in New England, and Brock Purdy, who was the last player picked in the 2022 draft, as its starters at the position. Loaded with motion and deception, based on a zone-running attack that features Christian McCaffrey, Shanahan runs as close to a plug-and-play system for a quarterback as it gets in the NFL, and it works. San Francisco has finished among the top 10 teams in scoring in four of the last seven years.

“They have a really good scheme,” Eagles defensive coordinator Vic Fangio said Tuesday. “It’s all packaged together very nicely. They give you a lot of good motions. Everything they do is with a purpose and they do a really good job of it.”

Nick Sirianni, the Eagles’ head coach, and Kevin Patullo, their offensive coordinator, are not considered the same kinds of coaches that Shanahan is. Say what you want about them — and a lot of what is said about them around here, especially about Patullo, can’t be repeated in decent company — but generally they are not among the first names mentioned when anyone starts listing the top offensive minds in the NFL. Sirianni stopped calling plays, for instance, in 2021, his first season as a head coach. Patullo had never been an NFL coordinator or play-caller before this season, and the Eagles’ up-and-down (to put it kindly) performance has made him a convenient and oft-deserved target of criticism.

NFL coaching, though, is about more than being an offensive wizard. Shanahan hasn’t won a Super Bowl in his career yet, and one of the reasons is that, when he and his teams have had opportunities to bury their opponents, they’ve failed to do it. He was the offensive coordinator of the 2016 Atlanta Falcons, who infamously blew a 28-3 lead in Super Bowl LI to the Patriots in part because Shanahan got too aggressive in his late-game play selection. Under him, the 49ers had double-digit fourth-quarter leads in Super Bowl LIV and in the 2021 season’s NFC title game … and lost both. And in Super Bowl LVIII against the Kansas City Chiefs, Shanahan took the ball first in overtime, opted to kick a field goal on fourth-and-4 from the Chiefs’ 9-yard line, and handed the ball back to Patrick Mahomes with a chance to win the game. Patrick Mahomes, to no one’s surprise, won the game.

Sirianni, meanwhile, has won a Super Bowl, has reached another, and has yet to have a losing season or miss the playoffs in his five years with the Eagles. Does he need a Shanahan-like or Shane Steichen-style play-caller to make his offense go? The presence of such an assistant certainly helps. But by all indications, he makes up for whatever shortcomings his coordinators — or, in fairness, his quarterback, Jalen Hurts — might have with his abilities as a culture-builder.

“Week-to-week, day-to-day, his energy, his passion, everything you want in a leader who stands in front of this team in team meetings and at practice, he gives you,” Patullo said. “His attention to detail — we talk about core values all the time: toughness, together, detailed, all that stuff. And when we look at those things, that’s what he embodies and brings that to the team. Every day, he’s consistent in who he is. You’re not going to get somebody who goes back and forth on what they say, and I think when he speaks, everybody receives it and they’re ready to go.”

There’s more than one way to be an excellent head coach, even if one of those ways gets a little more attention, a little more scrutiny, a little more credit these days. The film can tell you how good a coach Kyle Shanahan is. What Nick Sirianni does well sometimes isn’t so easy to see. Come Sunday, may the best savant win.