Seattle Seahawks linebacker Derick Hall left his mark on NFL history when he made a tone-setting sack in the Super Bowl against the New England Patriots in February of this year.
There is a low percentage chance that any football player will have a moment like this in their career. But Hall had to overcome much bigger obstacles. Hall had a 1% chance of survival when he was born four months premature at just 23 weeks gestation, born without a heartbeat and suffered a brain hemorrhage.
“I wasn’t born… breathing,” he told Pak Gazette Digital. “I was born dead.
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Derick Hall of the Seattle Seahawks sacks Drake Maye of the New England Patriots during the third quarter of NFL Super Bowl LX at Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, California, on February 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.
“Excitement, a lot of uncertainty, fear,” she said of her emotions in the days following her son’s premature birth. “But…those weren’t the feelings I felt during Derrick’s birth. I just trusted God to make everything right.”
That belief became the center of how the family made sense of everything that followed.
“It’s probably the most important thing we share,” Gooden-Crandle said of her religion.
“We are people of faith and have been for most of my life. I joined the church when I was 16 and I just grew up as a woman of faith. I 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 within that environment gave meaning to struggles he didn’t yet understand.
“It was huge. It was amazing because I never really understood why I or my family had to go through what I was going through,” Hall 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, Georgia, on December 7, 2025. (Perry Knotts/Getty Images)
“My pastor always told me, you’re not dying for this, you’re blessed to be in this position and God has something bigger for you, and I think that helped me be comfortable with the situation and the things that my family and I were enduring during that time.
“I always talk about my faith because obviously I’m a miracle child, and I don’t say I’m doing well, I say I’m blessed, I can’t complain, I’m above the earth and I’m blessed… You can’t tell me that a kid with a one percent chance of living and who’s not supposed to walk, he’s not supposed to talk, he’s 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 childhood, the challenges did not go away and his childhood was very different from other children.
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“My hardest period was from age four or five to age 12 or 13,” Hall said. “I could go out and play, but it was only for about five minutes at a time and I had to sit down for an hour just to allow my body and my lungs to recover, and to this day my lungs are still underdeveloped, they always will be, they will always be three years behind.”
Those boundaries extended to almost every aspect of his life, including the seasons when other children were outside playing freely.
But despite everything, Hall discovered football and his condition was not going to prevent him from participating in 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 soccer at four years old because I was trying to develop 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 feel like a normal kid,” he said.
For his mother, that moment came with a difficult decision about her son’s well-being.
“It was a difficult decision to make to allow him to play, so I allowed him to play flag football at first, but making that leap to allow him to play football when we were still seeing a neurologist every six months for a brain hemorrhage, it was a difficult decision,” 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 kept one, to make sure that if someone needed to get to them, they had what they needed… And as I progressed, I became more and more comfortable.”
Faith in letting him play football paid off when Hall received his first college scholarship offer when he was just in eighth grade, his mother said.
Hall went on to be a standout linebacker at Gulfport High School in Mississippi, going from a touted four-star prospect to a dominant All-SEC running back at Auburn University.
But even after coming all that way from her premature birth, she still had a moment where she feared for her life in college.
“I had a scare in college when I went to practice that morning and I wasn’t feeling very good, and the next day I got up to go to the bathroom and couldn’t take two steps without gasping for air,” Hall said. “We got to the hospital and the doctor said, ‘We’re glad you brought him in because if he had waited another hour he probably would have been in very bad shape.’
It was a turning point in the way he approached his own limits. But he did not 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 became 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 the opportunity to take his extraordinary story to the NFL, as he became the 37th pick in the 2023 NFL Draft.
But 2025 didn’t play out the way Derrick Hall expected, at least in terms of his individual stats early on. For much of the year, the numbers did not match the effort. He was getting pressure, taking hits, doing the work that doesn’t always make the headlines, but the sacks weren’t coming.
“I was constantly getting hit… I’m getting pressure,” Hall said. “But I can’t get myself fired… I say, Lord, whatever you have planned, let it reveal itself.”
Statistically, that frustration was real. Hall finished the regular season with just two sacks in 14 games, contributing more as a rotational edge presence than as a starting pass rusher. But within Seattle’s defense — a unit built on balance, depth and constant pressure — his role still mattered. The Seahawks relied on a collective pass rush rather than a dominant star, finishing the season as one of the most effective defensive fronts in the league.
And then, almost suddenly, everything changed.
On football’s biggest stage, in Super Bowl LX against the Patriots, Hall delivered the kind of performance that reshapes a career. He had two sacks and a forced fumble, including a sack that helped open the game and set the tone for Seattle’s 29-13 victory. That one play – breaking through the offensive line, fumbling the ball and creating a turnover – became one of the defining moments of the game.
To Hall, it didn’t seem like a coincidence. It seemed timely.
“I got to that Super Bowl and got both sacks, and I thought, man, there’s no time like God’s time,” he said. “That’s true, man.”
In a season where I had spent months waiting for the production to live up to the 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 a 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 living… ends up being a Super Bowl champion one day without the Lord being in their lives,” he said. “That’s a miracle in itself.”
Now, Hall and her mother are tying that story back to where it began: the neonatal intensive care unit, through a partnership with Huggies and its “Natural Born Fighters” campaign, which highlights premature babies and the care they receive in those first, most fragile days. The campaign focuses on supporting NICU babies with products designed together with nurses and doctors to meet their specific needs.
For Stacy, the association is rooted in memories she still holds close.
“In fact, both of my kids wore Huggies,” she said. “And I actually had one of their first diapers… but now you have to think, that was 25 years ago, think about all the designs they’ve done now… working with NICU nurses and doctors to develop a diaper specifically for NICU babies, that to me represents the best fight you could ever want to have for a brand that wants to make sure NICU babies have the best chance from the beginning of their fight.”
