Seahawks Super Bowl hero Derick Hall opens up about how ‘God’ saved him from near-certain death

Seattle Seahawks linebacker Derick Hall made his mark on NFL history by coming up with a tone-setting strip sack against the New England Patriots in the Super Bowl this February.

The likelihood of any football player experiencing such a moment in his career is very low. But Hall had to overcome much greater challenges. Hall had a 1 percent chance of survival when she was born four months prematurely, at just 23 weeks gestation, without a heartbeat and suffered a brain hemorrhage.

“I was not…born breathing,” he told Fox News Digital. “I was stillborn.

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For his mother, Stacy Gooden-Crandle, the first days of her son’s life were filled with uncertainty and fear.

“It’s emotional, a lot of uncertainty and fear,” she said of her feelings in the days following her son’s premature birth. “But… those weren’t the emotions I felt at Derrick’s birth. I just trusted that God would work it all out.”

This belief became central to how the family made sense of everything that followed.

“That’s probably the most important thing we share,” Gooden-Crandle said of their religion.

“We are people of faith and have been for most of my life. I joined the church when I was 16 and have just grown into a woman of faith. I have raised my children in the church, instilling faith in them and allowing them to grow in their faith in their walk with Christ.”

For Hall, growing up in this environment gave meaning to struggles he didn’t yet understand.

“It was overwhelming. It was incredible because I didn’t really understand why me or my family had to go through what I went through,” Hall said.

Derick Hall of the Seattle Seahawks watches from the sidelines during the national anthem before the NFL game against the Atlanta Falcons at Mercedes-Benz Stadium in Atlanta, Ga., on December 7, 2025. (Perry Knotts/Getty Images)

“My pastor always told me, you weren’t dying for this, you’re so lucky to be in this position and God has something bigger for you and I think that gave me comfort about the situation and the things that me and my family had to endure at that time.

“I always speak from my faith because obviously I’m a miracle kid and I’m not saying I’m doing well, I’m saying I’m blessed, I can’t complain, I’m above ground and I’m blessed… You can’t tell me that a kid who has a one in a percent chance of living and who shouldn’t be walking or talking or even being alive is going to be a Super Bowl champion one day without God in his life.”

Even after infancy, the difficulties did not disappear, and his childhood looked very different from other children.

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“My hardest time was from when I was four or five to when I was 12 or 13,” Hall said. “I could go out and play but it was only five minutes at a time and I had to sit for an hour to let my body and lungs recover and to this day my lungs are still underdeveloped, always will be, they will always be three years behind.”

These boundaries extended to nearly every aspect of his life, including the seasons when other children played freely outside.

But despite all this, Hall discovered football, and his condition would not keep him from the game that would define his life.

Derick Hall of the Seattle Seahawks holds the Vince Lombardi trophy on stage with his teammates after winning Super Bowl LX against the New England Patriots at Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, California on February 8, 2026. (Brooke Sutton/Getty Images)

“I started playing football when I was four because I was trying to improve my body and get to the point where I could do things, and I fell in love with it because it was the first thing I could do to make myself feel like a normal kid,” he said.

For his mother, that moment came with a difficult decision about her son’s health.

“It was hard to make the decision to let him play, so I initially let him play flag football, but it was a tough decision to make that jump to let him play football when we went to the neurologist every six months for a brain hemorrhage,” he said.

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“I made sure all the coaches had asthma pumps and rescue inhalers, and I gave one to the coaches, I gave one to the coaches, I held one to make sure if someone needed to get to him, they had what he needed…And as he progressed, I started to get more and more comfortable.”

Her belief in letting him play football paid off when Hall received his first college scholarship offer while still in eighth grade, his mother said.

Hall was a standout linebacker at Gulfport High School in Mississippi and rose from a four-star prospect to a dominant All-SEC offensive player at Auburn University.

But even though she had come so far from her premature birth, she still had a moment when she felt worried about her life at university.

“I had a scare in college that morning when I went to practice and I wasn’t feeling very well, the next day I got up to use the restroom and couldn’t even take two steps without being out of breath,” Hall said. “We got to the hospital and the doctor said, we’re glad you brought him in because if you had waited another hour he probably would have been in very bad shape.”

This was a turning point for him to approach his own limits. However, he did not give up his passion as a football player and remained true to his faith.

Hall finished his career at Auburn with 147 tackles, 19.5 tackles and 29.5 tackles in 40 games. A highly touted recruit, Hall has developed into a dominant SEC starter, earning first-team All-SEC honors in 2022 as a team captain known for his elite power, speed and high motor.

With the 37th pick in the 2023 NFL Draft, this earned him the chance to take his remarkable story to the NFL.

But 2025 hasn’t turned out the way Derrick Hall expected, at least in terms of individual stats. For most of the year the numbers did not match the effort. He was getting pressure, he was taking hits, he was doing things that didn’t always make the headlines, but the sacks weren’t coming.

“I was getting hit all the time… I was getting pressure,” Hall said. “But I can’t get the hang of it… God, whatever you’ve planned, let it reveal itself,” I say.

Statistically, this disappointment was real. Hall finished the regular season with just two sacks in 14 games, contributing more as a rotational edge than a headline pass rusher. But his role on Seattle’s defense, a unit built on balance, depth and consistent pressure, was still significant. The Seahawks turned to a collective passing offense rather than a single dominant star and finished the season as one of the league’s more effective defensive fronts.

And then almost everything changed in an instant.

On football’s biggest stage, in Super Bowl LX against the Patriots, Hall delivered the kind of performance that would reshape a career. He recorded two sacks and a forced fumble, including a strip sack that helped open the game and set the tone for Seattle’s 29-13 victory. This single play of passing the line of scrimmage, releasing the ball, and creating turnovers became one of the defining moments of the game.

For Hall, this didn’t feel like a coincidence. It felt like timing.

“I went to the Super Bowl and got both sacks and it was like there’s no time like God’s time, man,” he said. “That’s right, man.”

In a season where production had been waiting for months to match the effort, the breakthrough came at the most crucial moment.

“This year has been tough mentally,” he said. “But like I said, it’s a blessing.”

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After the game, the numbers told one story: two sacks, a forced fumble, a championship. But for Hall, the meaning was deeper, tied to something much bigger than a stat sheet.

“You can’t tell me that a kid with a one percent chance of survival is going to be a Super Bowl champion one day without God in his life,” he said. “This is a miracle in itself.”

Now Hall and her mother are connecting this story to where it began: the neonatal intensive care unit, through a partnership with Huggies and the “Born Born Warriors” campaign, which highlights premature babies and the care they receive in those first, most fragile days. The campaign focuses on supporting babies in the NICU with products designed in collaboration with nurses and doctors to meet their specific needs.

For Stacy, the partnership is rooted in memories she still holds close.

“Both of my kids were actually wearing Huggies,” she said. “And I actually had one of the first diapers… but you have to think about it now, that was 25 years ago, think about all the designs they’ve made now… Working with NICU nurses and doctors to develop a diaper specifically for NICU babies, to me, that represents the best challenge you could ever want for a brand that wants to make sure NICU babies have the best opportunities at the very beginning of their struggles.”

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