of larger-than-life personalities that thrived in the Tigers secondary.

He also grew up with football. It's the sport his father, Derek Stingley Sr., has played and coached his entire life. A sport he began getting Stingley Jr. ready to play at the age of just four.

That's when Dad started Son walking backward. It was playful and irregular, but there was always a greater purpose behind it: to make an unnatural motion feel more natural. At its core, playing cornerback defies how the human body was constructed to move. It counters anatomy—the feet, the joints and the eyes that were not designed to move backward.

"God made us to walk forward and to run forward, one foot out in front of the other, arms swinging one way," Stingley Sr. says. "Youhave to learn how to be able to be comfortable going backward first, because that's not the natural way of things."

By the age of seven, Stingley Jr. was watching NFL games with Dad. And not in the way most kids would. They would talk coverages and techniques, diving deeper in depth as Stingley Jr.'s knowledge of the sport grew.

Unlike his friends, Stingley Jr. was never really into toys. He played video games, but even those were almost always sports-related. Football, from as early as his father can remember, was his greatest interest.

Stingley Sr. also played cornerback, at Purdue before transferring and eventually graduating from Triton College, a community college in Illinois. After switching to baseball, largely because he was undersized at the time, he was drafted by the