Zack Baun: Top Graded LB / DPOTW [Why Baun Isn’t Still a Saint Thread]

St. Widge said

Except Baun is playing exactly the role that the Saints trained Baun to play and he was a square peg when they moved him to Mike. I get that DA was a terrible head coach, but not everything he did was wrong. At least not when it came to defense. And, IIRC, Anzalone's big problem here was that he could not stay healthy. Kind of similar to T-Rex until his last year here.

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Generally speaking, it appears Baun is good enough to develop and now play a central role on a winning team’s LB corps, but he’s not doing it for the Saints.

The Saints have bad LB depth this year and DA didn’t keep him around and instead signed Gay, an inferior player.

If the Saints are still a perennial contender and mostly stacking wins, nobody cares as much, but when you’re bottoming out and start seeing the good players you drafted, showing out for other teams in ways they never did for you, the association/assumption is made.

It’s like how we got Demario and Vilma from the Jets and they were a million times more productive for the Saints than in NYJ. We loved it because the Jets obviously have mostly sucked at developing and maintaining talent and have frequently had talented players leave and THEN take their game to the next level.

Essentially the Saints are the Jets now.

It might just be coincidence/bad luck, but it’s also what happens to bad franchises and I think that underlying concern leads to a lot of the fan complaints about the ones that got away.