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Seattle Seahawks linebacker Derick Hall made his mark on NFL history when he came up with a tone-setting strip sack in the Super Bowl against the New England Patriots this February.
There’s a low percent chance that any football player will get a moment like that in his career. But Hall had to beat much greater odds. Hall had a 1% chance of survival when he was born four months premature at just 23 weeks gestation, born without a heartbeat and suffering from a brain bleed.
“I wasn’t born… breathing,” he told Fox News Digital. “I was born dead.
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Derick Hall of the Seattle Seahawks strip sacks Drake Maye of the New England Patriots during the third quarter of the NFL Super Bowl LX at Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, Calif., on Feb. 8, 2026. (Brooke Sutton/Getty Images)
For his mother, Stacy Gooden-Crandle, those first days of her son’s life were filled with uncertainty and fear.
“Emotional, a lot of uncertainty, scared,” she said of her emotions in the days that followed her son’s premature birth. “But… those weren’t the feelings that I was feeling during Derrick’s birth. I just trusted that God would work everything out.”
That belief became the center of how the family made sense of everything that followed.
“It is probably the most important thing that we share,” Gooden-Crandle said of their religion.
“We are people of faith and have been for most of my lifetime. I joined church when I was 16 years old, and I’ve just grown up as a woman of faith. I’ve raised my children in the church and instilled faith in them and just allowed them to flourish in their faith in their walk with Christ.”
For Hall, growing up inside that environment gave meaning to struggles he didn’t yet understand.
“It was huge. It was amazing because I never really understood why me or why my family had to go through what I was going through,” Hall said said.
Derick Hall of the Seattle Seahawks watches from the sideline during the national anthem before an NFL game against the Atlanta Falcons at Mercedes-Benz Stadium in Atlanta, Ga., on Dec. 7, 2025. (Perry Knotts/Getty Images)
“My pastor always told me, you weren’t dying for this, you are blessed to be in this position and God has something greater for you, and I think that helped me be at ease with the situation and the things that me and my family were enduring during the time.
“I always speak to my faith because obviously I’m a miracle child, and I don’t say I’m doing good, I say I’m blessed, I can’t complain, I’m above ground and I’m blessed… You can’t tell me that a child with a one percent chance to live and not supposed to be walking, not supposed to be talking, not even supposed to be alive, ends up being a Super Bowl champion one day without the Lord being in their lives.”
Even after surviving infancy, the challenges didn’t disappear, and his childhood looked very different from other kids.
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“My hardest time period was from about the age of four or five to about the age of 12 or 13,” Hall said. “I could go out and play, but it was only for about five minutes at a time and I would have to go sit down for an hour just to allow my body and my lungs to catch back up, and to this day my lungs are still underdeveloped, they always will be, they’ll always be three years behind.”
Those limits extended into nearly every part of his life, including the seasons when other kids were outside playing freely.
But through it all, Hall discovered football, and his condition wasn’t going to 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, Calif., on Feb. 8, 2026. (Brooke Sutton/Getty Images)
“I started playing football at the age of four because I was trying to develop my body and get to the point where I was able to do things, and I fell in love with it because it was the first thing that I was able to do to make me feel like a normal kid,” he said.
For his mom, that moment came with a difficult decision about her son’s wellbeing.
“It was difficult to make the decision to allow him to play, so I allowed him to play flag football in the beginning, but making that jump to allow him to play tackle football when we were still seeing a neurologist every six months for a brain bleed, it was a difficult decision,” she said.
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“I made sure all the coaches had asthma pumps and rescue inhalers, and I gave one to the coaches, the trainers, I kept one, to make sure if somebody needed to get to him they had what he needed… And as he progressed, I was getting more and more comfortable.”
The faith in letting him play football paid off when Hall received his first college scholarship offer when he was just in the eighth grade, his mom said.
Hall went on to be a standout linebacker at Gulfport High School in Mississippi, rising from a touted four-star prospect to a dominant All-SEC edge rusher at Auburn University.
But even after coming all that way from his premature birth, he still had a moment where he feared for his life in college.
“I had a scare in college where I went to practice that morning and I wasn’t feeling that well, and the next day I got up to go use the restroom and I couldn’t take like two steps without gasping for air,” Hall said. “We got to the hospital and the doctor said, we’re glad you brought him because if you would have waited another hour he probably would have been in very bad shape.”
It was a turning point in how he approached his own limits. But he didn’t shy away from his passion as a football player, and remained committed to his faith.
Hall finished his career at Auburn with 147 tackles, 19.5 sacks and 29.5 tackles for loss in 40 games. A highly touted recruit, Hall 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.
It earned him a chance to take his extraordinary story to the NFL as he went on to be the 37th pick in the 2023 NFL Draft.
But the 2025 didn’t unfold the way Derrick Hall expected, at least in terms of his individual stats at first. For much of the year, the numbers didn’t match the effort. He was getting pressure, getting hits, doing the work that doesn’t always show up in headlines, but the sacks weren’t coming.
“I was steady getting hits… I’m getting pressures,” Hall said. “But I can’t get the sack… I’m like, Lord, whatever you got planned, let it reveal itself.”
Statistically, that frustration was real. Hall finished the regular season with just two sacks across 14 games, contributing more as a rotational edge presence than a headline pass rusher. But within Seattle’s defense — a unit built on balance, depth and consistent pressure — his role still mattered. The Seahawks leaned on a collective pass rush rather than one dominant star, finishing the season as one of the league’s more effective defensive fronts.
And then, almost all at once, everything changed.
On the biggest stage in football, in Super Bowl LX against the Patriots, Hall delivered the kind of performance that reshapes a career. He recorded two sacks and a forced fumble, including a strip sack that helped break the game open and set the tone for Seattle’s 29–13 win. That single play — driving through the offensive line, knocking the ball loose, and creating a turnover — became one of the defining moments of the game.
For Hall, it didn’t feel like a coincidence. It felt like timing.
“I got to that Super Bowl and I got both sacks, and I’m like, man, ain’t no time like God’s time,” he said. “That’s true, man.”
In a season where he had spent months waiting for production to match effort, the breakthrough came when it mattered most.
“Mentally it was tough this year,” 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 ran deeper, tied back to something far bigger than a stat sheet.
“You can’t tell me that a child with a one percent chance to live… ends up being a Super Bowl champion one day without the Lord being in their lives,” he said. “That’s a miracle in itself.”
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Jackson Thompson is a sports reporter for Fox News Digital covering critical political and cultural issues in sports, with an investigative lens. Jackson’s reporting has been cited in federal government actions related to the enforcement of Title IX, and in legacy media outlets including The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Associated Press and ESPN.com.
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