Meet the REAL Derek Stingley Jr., the Texans' QB-baiting shutdown corner

Derek Stingley Jr. is the first cornerback I've ever met who is not excited to talk about his best plays. He might be the first cornerback I've ever met who isn't excited to talk, period.

We sit together in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, where the Houston Texans have spent a week in training camp hidden from the blistering Texas sun, watching some of what I consider his most impressive moments. Eventually, I ask for his favorite interception of his career. He shrugs, rubbing his beard with a long ummmm in his characteristic deep Louisiana drawl. He doesn't have an answer.

He has plenty to choose from. Stingley has eight picks over the past two seasons, tied for the most among cornerbacks. Expand it to include passes defensed and nobody stands next to Stingley. Since Week 10 of 2023 -- when he returned from an early-season hamstring injury -- he has 38 pass breakups and interceptions combined. The next closest player has 33. If the ball is in the air, there simply is no defender in the world better than Stingley.

Watch all 38 plays, and what stands out isn't the catch point technique or closing speed. It's the fact that Stingley doesn't get up and jaw at the receiver after any of them. Fourth-down pass breakup against the Chargers in the playoffs -- no dramatic seatbelt sweep across the body. End-of-half pick against the Jaguars in the enormous Week 9 comeback, and he just jogs away with a little extra swagger, trotting to the end zone to celebrate with his teammates.

"I don't know how to do it," Stingley says of talking trash. "I just laugh."

Stingley is happy to talk about the plays he almost made, though -- pass breakups that weren't quite hauled in for takeaways. And he will have the chance for more plays on the ball Thursday when the Texans face the Bills in Houston (8:15 p.m. ET, Prime Video).

IT STARTS WITH a rep against Lions receiver Jameson Williams. This was the 2024 game in which Jared Goff threw five picks -- none to Stingley, because Goff targeted Stingley only once and never tested him the rest of the game. Here's that lone target.

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Stingley's in quarters here, which means he's responsible for all vertical routes from Williams. Because he's off the line of scrimmage at the snap, he can't press Williams or in any way impede him from reaching top speed -- and there are few receivers in the league with more dangerous top speed.

The Lions are running what we refer to as a "beater," because the concept is designed specifically to beat quarters looks. No matter. As Williams fakes outside, then leans to the post and hits the gas, Stingley runs with him, stride for stride. Williams turns his head to find the football; Stingley turns at the exact same time. The ball is a little short, and Williams throttles down. Watch Stingley weave away from him to ensure he doesn't get flagged for downfield contact before surging back to the catch point and elevating.

This is an elite rep, but all Stingley has to say about it is "Drop."

Dropped interceptions are typically more egregious than this one. Defensive backs drop throws that hit them in both hands, right on the numbers, all the time. Throws that they see coming the whole way and are square to as they arrive. But this ball is a 50-yard moonshot, tracked at full speed, that Stingley has to leap to catch over his shoulder. Receivers drop this throw. It was a tough catch.

"No," Stingley said, shaking his head. "No, it wasn't."

Stingley thinks this is an easy catch because he's made it plenty before. This running, leaping basket catch is one of his calling cards.

Here's one he did catch. Houston is facing another quarters beater, this time from the Broncos in 2023. Stingley is responsible for vertical routes from the outermost receiver, which is Courtland Sutton. Sutton looks like he's running a dig -- an intermediate, in-breaking route -- that Stingley will give away to safety Jalen Pitre. But it's a trap! Sutton is actually running a dig-and-go, meant to take advantage of Pitre's aggressiveness and coverage rules in quarters. The Broncos think they've got Houston dialed.

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Not Stingley. The moment he sees the short motion before the snap, Stingley is expecting a route combination just like this one. The game plan that week was to allow Pitre to aggressively drive on the dig and have Stingley protect him in coverage over the top. It was his job to stay on top of Sutton and go get the dig-and-go.

The Texans are far from the first team to draw such a coverage overlap on the chalkboard. But for everyone else, it's almost purely theoretical. It's how they'd like to cover it, but cornerbacks don't actually get to the hash this fast, beating the throw and winning at the catch point. Only X's on a chalkboard do.

Stingley yanks theory into reality. Look at the speed with which he closes on Sutton; look at how he adjusts his path to the ball before the throw is even halfway through the air, recognizing that he can snake in front of Sutton, who doesn't realize he's lurking. And then look at the catch -- elevated, pinkies together.

Here's another, this time against Seattle this season. The Seahawks look to be running snag -- a common three-man concept that would see tight end AJ Barner on a corner route to occupy Stingley outside the numbers. But they've tweaked the combination slightly, running Barner into the seam to attack Houston's Cover 3.

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Sam Darnold has not even begun his throwing motion when Stingley takes an angle to the catch point. He's so far ahead of the route that he has to slow down to allow Barner to get upfield. Stingley plucks the ball out of the air while running perpendicular to the path of the throw. That's a tough catch, no matter what any All-Pro cornerback tries to say.

STINGLEY THINKS HE was four years old the first time his father, Derek Stingley Sr., started putting him through hand-eye coordination drills in the backyard. He would catch the ball "around the clock" -- up above his head at 12 o'clock, down his right side through 3 o'clock and so on. All of the catches between 3 and 9 force the hands to supinate, bringing the pinkies together into the underhanded basket that Stingley has stylized as his own. Then Stingley and his father would run the whole route tree, catching passes, before covering the whole route tree, shagging interceptions.

Stingley caught passes again and again and again -- not just from his father but also from his father's players. Stingley Sr. was an Arena Football League coach, and "Little Sting" -- as the AFL players would call him -- would do drills with his father's defensive backs over the summer. As Sr. bounced from team to team, Little Sting would put on the new colors and drill with his new teammates. But the players that Stingley remembers best are actually the receivers -- P.J. Berry, Mike Washington, Scott Coleman.

If Stingley has all of this unbelievable athleticism and catches the ball so well, why did he end up a cornerback and not a receiver? He doesn't know. But he knows why he remembers the receivers. "Whenever they would throw the ball to me, they wouldn't throw it to me like I was a little kid," he said. "They wouldn't throw the little small ones that kids had. It was the big one."

Today, Stingley has the kind of relationship with the football that defensive coaches at all levels dream their CBs would have. When he does catching drills, he does them without gloves. It makes every catch just a little bit harder, which is certainly good training -- but it also puts the football on his skin. The contact lingers; the hand remembers the ball and wants it back.

Stingley gives every ball that he has successfully intercepted to his dad, who enshrines them in a glass case with a picture of the INT. In some ways they're trophies meant for display -- a father's pride in his son. But they're also valuables, sealed in vaults.

This is why Stingley views all of his pass breakups with such disdain: He doesn't get to keep the ball. I pull up a third-down PBU on Jacksonville's Brian Thomas Jr. -- one of Stingley's 13 total snaps from the slot last season, as he was occasionally pulled inside while shadowing a star receiver. The Jaguars had Thomas on a slot fade, but Stingley suffocates the route, taps the ball into the sideline and brings out the punt team.

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Before the play even begins to run, Stingley is shaking his head. "Ack. I should have caught that one," he said, watching it back. "Why am I not making that play?"

So what happened?

"I thought it looked like the ball was going further than what it was," Stingley explained. "That's why I only stuck one hand up. This is one of the ones where I'm in a different area of the field. I'm in the slot, so my head angle needed to change, just a little bit more to see the drop of the ball. I kept it as if I was still on the sideline, so it looked like it was going further."

Stingley has something to say about these plays, the almost-hads, the ones he sees when he closes his eyes at night. And in his disappointment, the expertise starts to shine through.

"When you flip your head, flip it as fast as you can -- but you got to look up," Stingley said, describing optimal ball-tracking technique. "Most corners, they don't look up when they're turning around. If you're looking late when the ball is already in the air, you're going to miss it, so you got to look up. That's if you see what their eyes see."

See what their eyes see?

"If [the receiver's] eyes go up before their head moves -- like, their eyes will get wide when [the ball]'s coming from a high angle, coming down. If it's a back shoulder, or more in the dark, their head will turn. But their shoulder will also turn, and they'll slow down ... because they've got to adjust to the ball. That one's a little tougher, because the receiver doesn't even know where the ball is going to go for that one. But the one over the top, they look up first."

Texans cornerbacks coach Dino Vasso, who has coached Stingley for his entire professional career, tags this as the one thing that makes Stingley special: his translation of a receiver's body language into the location of the football.

"He knows where the football is before he looks," Vasso said. This has become normal to him.

THE TEXANS' DEFENSIVE back room, led by Vasso, has a saying. It's one that Stingley has heard from the moment he entered the big leagues: "The man can't beat you. Only the ball can."

If that's so, more idiosyncrasies of Stingley's play become easier to understand. Much like the man himself, Stingley's play style is quiet. He aligns in press coverage often, but he rarely jams opposing receivers with two hands to suffocate them off the line and disrupt their timing. On vertical routes, many cornerbacks lean into receivers, pushing them into the sideline and restricting the room for the ball to arrive; Stingley rarely initiates that contact.

Because he doesn't jam or lean, there's often more space between Stingley and the receiver than other star corners allow. "Sometimes, they may look more open than what they are down the field," Stingley admitted sheepishly. "But most quarterbacks can't throw that perfect pass 60 yards down the field."

He would know. Since the start of last season, Stingley has been targeted in coverage 20-plus yards downfield 35 times, more than any other cornerback. He has allowed five catches. He has intercepted or defended the pass 16 times.

"He doesn't intentionally bait quarterbacks and receivers, but if there is some separation, he has the ability to close that pretty quickly," Vasso said. "He gets to top speed extremely quick -- probably faster than anybody I've been around."

Here's a game-sealing pick against the Dolphins last season that Texans coach DeMeco Ryans called the best play he has ever seen. Stingley is in the slot, where ball tracking is oh-so-slightly different. He's in true man coverage against the speedy Tyreek Hill. He doesn't jam him off the line, and he doesn't get connected and lean on him when Hill wheels vertically downfield. The man cannot beat him. Only the ball can.

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Hill's helmet turns, his eyes wide. Stingley knows where the ball is before he looks.