Zack Baun waited and waited. Waited to hear his name, waited for his work and his football potential to be recognized. It was the 2020 NFL draft, and he tried to stay hopeful as he heard name after name after name get called. Not his.
He had a standout career at Wisconsin, morphing into a star at outside linebacker after being sidelined with multiple injuries early in his college career, including a foot injury that forced him to miss the entire 2017 season. He racked up 12.5 sacks as a senior in 2019, to go along with 76 tackles and 19.5 tackles for loss. He was the first consensus All-American linebacker in program history. The Ringer’s Big Board had him ranked 43rd, and he was no. 36 on Todd McShay’s board. Baun himself had heard first-round buzz. Yet, as he watched the first and second rounds of the draft, he kept slipping. Again and again.
Thirty picks passed. Then 60. Then 70.
The third round began. Baun wondered whether—and when—he would finally get his chance.
That experience was a microcosm for his entire journey in football. He had to stay patient, stay resilient, and learn how to fight through adversity that came with a career that didn’t necessarily go according to plan. “To stick it out through tough times, to keep my head high through tough times. I’m in the NFL, I’m [now] running for Defensive Player of the Year, but not everything has been sunshine and rainbows for me,” Baun said.
The biggest concern as he slid on that draft night? What position he’d play—with his body type, he was likely a better fit at inside linebacker than pass rusher in the pros, but it wasn’t a position he’d played in college.
“I think people thought he couldn’t play inside linebacker,” said Bobby April, his outside linebackers coach at Wisconsin, who is now coaching at Stanford. “He felt like he could.”
Baun was an off-ball linebacker by trade, and he almost exclusively rushed the passer at Wisconsin. Wisconsin’s coaches worked to prepare him for a position switch in the NFL by giving him opportunities to play inside linebacker during spring practices, but still, NFL teams considering drafting him would have to imagine him doing something he had never done in games. “He was the best available guy on that list for a long time,” April said.
“That was probably agonizing for a kid that felt like he should be already on a team,” April said, “just watching guys that … he’s better than going in front of him. That’s a confidence killer.”
His coaches tried to lift his spirits. “Keep your head up,” April said when he reached out to him during the draft. “Don’t worry. … It’s all going to work out in its right way.”
Finally, Sean Payton and the Saints traded up to pick him at no. 74. His slide was over. And while he tried to make the most of his time in New Orleans as a special teams player, it was never quite the right fit on defense; the Saints primarily had him play as a reserve outside linebacker on the line of scrimmage.
The Saints went through a coaching change after his second season, in January 2022, when Payton stepped away and was replaced by Dennis Allen. And later Baun once again had a season cut short, landing on injured reserve in December 2022 with a calf injury.
He then played a career-high 301 snaps on defense in 2023, nearly as many as in his first three seasons combined, but never had more than 30 tackles in a season. He did have an interception, the first thrown by no. 2 draft pick and eventual NFL Offensive Rookie of the Year C.J. Stroud. The transition to inside linebacker that he was expecting after college simply never happened in New Orleans.
It would have been easy for Baun to blame the Saints for his lack of playing time or development during his four years in New Orleans. Instead, he reflected about his own shortcomings as a Saint. “I had opportunities with the Saints, and a lot of that was on me. I just didn’t take advantage,” Baun said. “I didn’t truly know the meaning of what taking advantage of an opportunity was. Honestly, I blame a lot of that situation on me and not being able to progress.”
“Coming to Philly,” Baun continued, “I had a different perspective. I had gone through that, I had experienced that, and I knew what to do.”
The Eagles saw enough potential in the 27-year-old to sign him on a one-year contract on March 13, 2024, giving him the shot he desperately needed.
“When we signed Zack, I was extremely excited,” said Bobby King, the Eagles’ inside linebackers coach, who scouted Baun in 2020 when the coach was with the Texans.
King had studied Baun’s clips when he was with the Saints, and even though he had played only a handful of snaps at inside linebacker in the previous four years, it was clear to King and Eagles defensive coordinator Vic Fangio where Baun would play in Philadelphia. The vision was for Baun to immediately take over as a starting inside linebacker. “Loved the toolbox, loved the size, movement,” King said. “Then when I started talking football with him, I was like, ‘I think this kid could do this.’”
He was right. “It was pretty obvious after a few weeks, like, this guy is a freaking player,” King said. “It’s going to work out.”
It turned out to be one of the most brilliant free agent signings this season. “Credit the kid. He obviously has God-given instincts that you can’t teach, and he’s got the body size and the movement already, and then with [Fangio’s] defense, it was just a nice fit,” King said.
Baun was named a first-team All-Pro, is a finalist for the NFL’s Defensive Player of the Year award, and was voted into his first Pro Bowl. “He had to pay his dues,” April said. “It’s who he is: silently proving people wrong.”
“I’m just glad that Philadelphia liked what they saw from him in college,” said April. “And now Zack’s paying them back for believing in him.”
Baun has anchored the league’s no. 1–ranked defense all the way to the Super Bowl. The Eagles will face the defending champions, the Kansas City Chiefs, for the second time in three seasons.
Baun has been fantastic—a seamless fit for the Eagles and a big reason why their hard-nosed defense is so suffocating. His ability to change directions and his body awareness are second to none, and he frequently seems to come out of nowhere and make the big play. “He’s really taken the ball hawk stuff to a new level,” King said. “And it’s really been contagious because it’s kind of spread throughout the whole defense.”
Baun gets a glimmer in his eyes and even flashes a smile when he’s about to make a clutch play. His Eagles coaches and teammates know that look. “He’s got a little gleam in his eye,” King said, remembering Baun’s savvy forced fumble against the Cowboys.
On January 12, Baun had a monster interception against the Packers in the wild-card playoff game. He also had a forced fumble (and recovered a different fumble) in the NFC championship game.
“He’s done a hell of a job for us,” Fangio said. He knew that Baun could be an inside linebacker “quickly,” he said. While Baun lacked experience at the position, he quickly proved that he belonged. “He exceeded my expectations,” Fangio said.
And the expectations of so many others. Baun, a player who had to fight to get one Division I scholarship offer, has emerged as an unlikely NFL star.
“The opportunity to get to a Super Bowl is incredible in its own right,” said Ross Kolodziej, Wisconsin’s strength and conditioning coach during Baun’s college years. “But just to see the impact that he’s had on [the Eagles’] success, and really the NFL, … he’s arguably playing the best football of anyone in the league right now.”
But Baun’s route to NFL stardom was more than circuitous. It seemed unclear at so many points. He had to wait his turn, whether being sidelined by injuries or playing behind other, more established linebackers. His background of competitive play in multiple sports, including basketball and track, has given him a distinct skill set and explosiveness that have helped revitalize his career and, most importantly, led Philadelphia to the big game.
Kolodziej saw Baun’s struggles to get to this point firsthand, having spent hours in the training room with him while he was rehabbing his injuries during his first two years of college. “He went through a lot mentally and physically,” said Kolodziej, who is now Stanford’s defensive line coach. “I do use him as an example in the current state of things in college football, where, I don’t know if that guy makes it. I think he’s a guy that probably some teams would put in the portal even, nowadays. But to his credit, he continued to push through and persevere.”
Baun refused to accept quitting or transferring as possibilities. He kept persevering, believing he could make it—as he always had, even as a teenager, when he moved high schools before his junior year, back when college recruiters barely knew his name.
“I was here, I was there. I fought through a tough time in college where I was hurt. I was a backup. I had to wait my turn. Then I got to the NFL, and I kind of had to wait my turn. There were a lot of different things that added up to being able to fight through tough times.”
It’s made him mentally tougher. “A lot of guys are at the top of the world in college, when they’re starting and playing, and then when they come to the NFL and they get put right back at the bottom and they have to play special teams, and a lot of guys can’t handle that. I do my best to talk about mental health with guys who are going through certain things. It’s been a big part of my journey.”
Baun was never just a football player. Growing up, he was an athlete who could be plugged into any sport he tried. While playing basketball for Brown Deer High School in Wisconsin, he’d windmill dunk over opponents with ease. He excelled at track and field, breaking the school record in the 200-meter dash (21.53 seconds) and clearing a bar at 6 feet, 8 inches in the high jump even though he weighed nearly 200 pounds. His unique blend of speed and power was astounding, considering he was competing against jumpers who were 50 pounds lighter.
His high-jumping drew a crowd because it was so rare to see a high school athlete of his stature leap like that. When Baun ran indoor track, he took up the whole lane, and at home meets, his coaches assigned him the outside lane so that he didn’t have to run the tightest curve.
Robert Green, who coached him in football and track at Brown Deer, said that Baun once picked up shot put and threw for 50 feet with only one day of practice. “He’s an alpha competitor,” Green said. “He was always willing to try something new.”
Baun had so much potential that longtime Wisconsin assistant track and field coach Nate Davis was trying to recruit him to be a decathlete at the university.
“There’s no doubt in my mind he’d have been not just an NCAA-level decathlete,” Davis said. “I coach the only American to finish three decathlons in the Olympics, three-time Olympian Zach Ziemek. He was that level athlete, high-level national-caliber, international-caliber athlete.”
Baun even played tennis competitively before high school. When he was a child, his mother, Genell, signed him up for a variety of extracurricular activities—including dance class. Perhaps that’s where some of his elite flexibility, coordination, and mobility stems from, Green said. “His ability to flip his hips for a big man like that is crazy, and he’s just very, very smooth when he moves,” Green said.
And powerful. The first time Kelly Appleby, the Brown Deer basketball coach, saw Baun play basketball, he dunked, then the next time down, he threw a baseball pass to a teammate at the rim for an easy bucket. He started talking to Baun, asking him what he’d done over the summer. “I played a little tennis,” Appleby remembered Baun saying. It floored him; someone with so much talent, so much athleticism, wasn’t practicing or playing hoops every waking second of his day. It just looked easy for him.
Baun starred for the Brown Deer basketball team, leading his school to a state title as a junior; he also quickly became the football team’s quarterback. “You would have thought that he had played for multiple, multiple, multiple years within our system,” Green said. “He picked it up really, really quick.”
As a quarterback, he had excellent vision, lateral movement, and hand-eye coordination, likely from the combination of all his other sports, his coaches said. He had 94 touchdowns in his two seasons at Brown Deer, and as a senior, he was named a first-team All-State quarterback and was picked as the Offensive Player of the Year by the Wisconsin Football Coaches Association.
But Baun largely flew under the radar as a football recruit, rated as a three-star prospect by 247 Sports, ESPN, and Rivals. Before Paul Chryst’s arrival at Wisconsin in 2015, when Baun was a high school senior, Wisconsin’s staff had hardly noticed him.
It was Davis, the track and field coach, who first noticed Baun and tried to put him on the football staff’s radar. While Davis is a longtime Badger, having coached at the university for 20 years, he’s also a former college football player and coach. When he’s recruiting, he simply looks for great athletes. That’s what he saw when he encountered Baun at a state track meet. “He’s doing everything. He’s the hurdler, he’s a sprinter, he’s a high jumper,” Davis said. “And he’s huge.
“Just looking at him, I’m like, ‘There’s no way this dude doesn’t play football.’”
As Davis remembers it, he called Wisconsin’s football recruiting coordinator at the time and said: “Hey, you guys are on this Zack Baun guy from Brown Deer, right?”
“It’s silence on the other end,” Davis recalled. He felt compelled to go to the office. “I’m excited,” he said. “Like, we need this guy.”
He remembered that the football staff wasn’t familiar with Baun at first, and he was told that Baun wasn’t a fit for the Badgers. Davis said he felt like they were blowing him off, so he kept going in there week after week during the football season, for two months straight. “I love Badger sports,” Davis said. If he was successful in convincing the football coaches to recruit Baun, he knew it would cost him a chance to get him on the track and field team. But it was worth it.
“We’ve lost lots of guys like that to football, and it’s worked out for them. But that’s what you do as a coach. You’re always kind of bird-dogging for the hidden gems,” Davis said. “When you see a kid like [Zack], you’re like, ‘We need this guy.’ I don’t care what he plays.”
The football staff eventually came around. They initially had Baun on their board as a grayshirt recruit, meaning that they wanted him to delay enrolling until the second semester of his freshman year to help with roster logistics. Then, Chryst and his new staff arrived. They were higher on Baun than the previous staff, and they rated him as a preferred walk-on—no scholarship, but he could start practicing with the team right away as a freshman. All that changed, though, when they saw his basketball highlight tape.
“Showing his explosion, his dunks,” said Inoke Breckterfield, Wisconsin’s former defensive line coach, who is now at Baylor. “That was kind of like, holy. … We saw him jumping out of the gym.”
It became clear to the new Badgers staff: “That’s a guy that we need to put on scholarship,” Breckterfield said.
Signing with Wisconsin gave Baun a chance to compete at a new position—outside linebacker. But it wasn’t an easy road to playing time when he arrived in Madison, in large part because there were talented linebackers in front of him, including T.J. Watt and Leon Jacobs. “There just weren’t enough snaps,” April said. Baun redshirted his first season in 2015 and missed time during the 2016 season because of a knee injury. Then, when he finally felt fully healthy heading into the 2017 season, he suffered a foot injury during preseason camp. He missed the season completely. According to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, he had two surgeries.
“I felt like he was really turning a corner in terms of his growth, development,” Kolodziej said, “and him losing the season so close right before it even started when he’d already been kind of pushing the rock up the hill, it just came rolling right back down on him tenfold.”
Baun didn’t let himself give up, working as hard as he could in rehab. April often reminded him to focus on the current moment. “Live with today’s opportunity,” April would tell him. “Don’t stress about what’s going to happen in the future. Just worry about right now.”
Grappling with how quickly things had changed was difficult. He had so much explosiveness in high school, and now his body almost had to teach itself how to move again. He had to walk before he could even think about sprinting. “Someone that’s never been hurt, to have to deal with all that, the anxiety that comes with it, the pressure of feeling like you’re getting passed up, it can weigh on you,” April said.
“Credit to him to have the maturity and wisdom in that moment to be like, ‘OK, damn. I’m going to bounce back from this,’” Kolodziej said.
“He’s somebody that’s just going to keep pushing through,” Kolodziej said. “And he will ultimately find a way.”
He thrived when he was finally able to play, having a breakout performance with three sacks in a shutout against Kent State in 2019. A week later, he had a pick-six against Michigan State that changed the momentum of the game.
He knew, despite all he had achieved in college, that he’d have to prove himself again in the NFL. Once again, just as when he began his time at Wisconsin, he arrived in New Orleans buried on the depth chart at linebacker. He had to wait his turn. He took full responsibility for how he underperformed with the Saints, and he recognized that he’d need to maximize his opportunity in the NFL with a fresh start in Philadelphia. “I won’t blame the New Orleans Saints organization at all. I honestly think it was more mental development for me,” Baun said. “I knew I could do it physically, but it was just more mentally from my standpoint.”
He credits his wife, Ali, for always being there for him when it comes to talking about his struggles and mental health. “Talking to my wife at home, she always gets it out of me,” Baun said. “It’s really my safe space, to disconnect from the game and spend time with her.”
Philadelphia turned out to be just what he needed. “It was a better fit for my game and my play style,” Baun said. And he was eager to prove that he belonged when he was named a starter before the season.
“I was kind of given the keys to the car,” Baun said, “and told not to crash it.” He laughed. “I didn’t crash it, so that’s good.”
He did so much more. In Week 1 of this season, he had 15 total tackles and two sacks—his first career multi-sack game. He had a breakout performance in Week 10 in a 34-6 win against Dallas, getting two forced fumbles and a fumble recovery, which earned him NFC Defensive Player of the Week honors.
The Eagles will need him to come up clutch once again in the Super Bowl. Baun is cherishing the opportunity, knowing how hard he fought to get here. To stay patient. To stay resilient. He can’t worry about the future. Snap by snap. Today is all he has. When he thinks of advice he has for others enduring adversity, others who may not believe in themselves, he simply said:
“Just keep going.”
Lindsay Jones contributed reporting to this story.
