“This is what every kid dreams about. I started playing this game just to get my lung capacity up, just to be able to run around a little bit, and I fell in love with the game. It allowed me to be a normal kid. I would always sit and watch other kids outside running around, and I wasn’t able to do those things.”<\/p>\n
Thanks to the extension he signed on Wednesday, Hall will continue living his NFL dream in a Seahawks uniform for years to come, an important development both for his security and for the future of Seattle’s defense. And fittingly, given the journey they have been on together, Hall was joined by his mom, and sister R’hana Gooden, for the signing after they flew from Mississippi, with a stop in Atlanta, to arrive in Seattle at 1 a.m. ahead of his signing before turning around to fly home a couple hours after.<\/p>\n
“It means everything,” Hall said of having his mom there to be part of the big moment. “It just shows again how much she means to me and how much I mean to her for her to fly here over night, leaving in a couple of hours, just to be here for this special moment. That means a lot.”<\/p>\n
For Gooden-Crandle, there have been a lot of emotions in the past few months after celebrating a Super Bowl title with her son on the field at Levi’s Stadium and now seeing him sign a life-changing contract.<\/p>\n
“It’s been a range of emotions from joy to happiness, and sometimes fear, because it’s a dangerous game and he has had some injuries,” she said. “But I just thank God for him, and being able to celebrate that Super Bowl moment with him\u2014he said before the Super Bowl, ‘I didn’t win anything in high school, and my college never went to a championship,’ so to see him hoist that Lombardi Trophy, knowing that all of his hard work led him to that moment, that was a blessing.”<\/p>\n
Selected 37th overall in 2023 with one of the picks Seattle acquired in the 2022 Russell Wilson trade, Hall has emerged as a key piece of Seattle’s defensive front over the past two seasons. Hall had a breakout 2024 season, recording 8.0 sacks and two forced fumbles as a starter, and while his playing time decreased a bit in 2025, in part due to the addition of DeMarcus Lawrence, Hall was still a big part of Seattle’s Dark Side defense. Hall recorded only 2.0 sacks in the regular season, but was much more effective as a pass-rusher than that number would indicate, and as his two-sack performance in the Super Bowl showed. He was also a key part of a run defense that held opponents to a league-low 3.7 yards-per-carry average in 2025, with the Seahawks not allowing an individual 100-yard rusher the entire season, giving them a franchise-record 29-game streak, postseason included, without allowing a 100-yard rusher.<\/p>\n
“He’s played great football for us all year,” Seahawks coach Mike Macdonald said after the Super Bowl. “He just plays the right way, man. Just plays so violently, relentlessly.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"“This is what every kid dreams about. I started playing this game just to get my lung capacity…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":909012,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2081],"tags":[14161,7,509,507,6399,506,6,238,237,261,2635],"class_list":["post-909011","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-seattle-seahawks","tag-derick-hall","tag-football","tag-homepage-hero","tag-news-national-feature","tag-news-roster-moves","tag-news-stories","tag-nfl","tag-seahawks","tag-seattle","tag-seattle-seahawks","tag-seattleseahawks"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@nfl\/116687154966953292","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/909011","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=909011"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/909011\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/909012"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=909011"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=909011"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=909011"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}