ATLANTA — When LSU freshman cornerback Derek Stingley Jr. completes the arc of his college career, which at this rate will end after three seasons and among the upper crust of the NFL draft, the first chapter of his story will be defined by the following:

— He’s been this good from day one.

He arrived on campus as a 17-year-old midyear enrollee, in time to participate in the tail end of the Tigers’ preparations for the Fiesta Bowl, and was immediately thrown into the fire. Pitted by LSU coaches against the Tigers’ starting offense, Stingley intercepted future Heisman Trophy winner Joe Burrow during his first practice.

“If there’s was an adjustment,” LSU coach Ed Orgeron said of the transition from high school to the SEC, “it was from the time we broke the huddle to the time he was covering the receiver.”

— Teammates give him grief about his youthful appearance.

He is now only 18, after all, but looks even younger, the scraggly growth of hair on his chin notwithstanding. The face of this year’s team, Burrow, gave his verbal commitment to Ohio State when Stingley was in middle school; Burrow earned his graduate degree before Stingley earned his high school diploma. You look 16, teammates will say.

“They just look their age,” Stingley said of his teammates. “A lot of them say I don’t look like I’m 18. I act younger, I guess. I don’t know.”

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— He’s exceeding all recent benchmarks within a program known for identifying and developing elite defensive backs.

LSU assistant coach Corey Raymond has led the Tigers’ defensive backs for eight seasons, coaching three first-round picks, seven overall draft choices and seven first-team All-America selections. At this stage, Raymond said, Stingley is the best he’s had. Nobody within the program is surprised — not by the six interceptions, not by the All-America accolades, not by how Stingley has embraced playing on an island in LSU’s defensive scheme and more than held his own against a parade of upper-echelon talent.

“No, we’re not,” said senior cornerback Kristian Fulton. “We got a glimpse of him. We knew he was going to special. So nobody is surprised.”

He has the chance to enter the pantheon of defensive backs at LSU, Orgeron said, following in a tradition embodied in recent years by Stingley’s idol, Patrick Peterson. But not even Peterson was this good, this soon, at this young age — perhaps only former LSU safety Tyrann Mathieu had this sort of impact as a true freshman.

“He’s going to be a big name around here for a lot of years to come,” said safety Grant Delpit.

— What does surprise, however, is that offenses continue to throw at Stingley.

Georgia tested Stingley in the first half of the SEC championship game, in the second half, even after Stingley added a pair of interceptions to his growing total. During the regular season, the freshman allowed just 29 completions on 69 targeted attempts, per Pro Football Focus, and gave up just two completions longer than 26 yards.

Yet quarterbacks still aim toward his side, perhaps out of some necessity: Fulton is on the opposite side and Delpit, an All-America safety, patrols the middle, so testing Stingley may be the safer challenge, relatively speaking. There’s still some confusion.

“I don’t know. I don’t know,” Delpit said. “Georgia tried him a lot in the SEC championship game and he got two picks and they were still doing it.”

Stingley admitted he may represent the lesser of all evils to opposing quarterbacks: “I’m not surprised, because I know Kristian Fulton on the other side of me, they’re not going to throw at him. I mean, if I was an offensive person and I saw a senior on one side and a freshman on the other, I’d go with the freshman.”

— He doesn’t talk much, which endears him to teammates who respect his humility and work ethic and wobbles receivers used to chatterbox defensive backs.

“I just kind of walk around and do what I have to do,” Stingley said. “I just observe people.”

This is ingrained in his personality, part of a legacy handed down from his father, also named Derek, who coached his son throughout his youth and high school career, and his grandfather, Darryl, a first-round first pick by the New England Patriots in 1973 who spent five years in the NFL before his career was cut short by a spinal-cord injury. The family would spend Christmas with Darryl Stingley, who more than once gifted his grandson this present: a Darth Vader mask and cape, complete with breathing apparatus. Stingley would don the costume and imitate Vader’s rasp, and you can imagine that SEC wide receivers would recognize the wordless prowl.

“I like a talker, just to motivate me a little bit,” said wide receiver Jordan Jefferson. “It also intimidates the receiver if he’s not talking and he’s doing what he needs to do.”

— Stingley put pen to paper as a teenager and compiled a to-do checklist of achievements, and has already scratched off several items on his registry.

One was playing cornerback at LSU. “Now I’m here,” he said. He wanted to make an immediate impact. He had individual goals, which went unmentioned, and with a slight smile admitted that “there’s a lot that I’ve accomplished,” even if there’s “some that I still haven’t been able to do.”

One is to pull off a pick-six, which has proved elusive since he was a junior at The Dunham School in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, since teams avoided Stingley entirely during his senior year. He wouldn’t mind dabbling on offense — he also played receiver in high school — but knows that’s “not a big topic of discussion” for this season or next.

“But if that happens junior year, then that might be a little nice.”

— He’s only scratching the surface of the depth of his potential, said coaches and teammates, and despite ample evidence to the contrary has room to improve.

Asked to grade his own performance, Stingley assigned himself a rating of 7 on a 1-10 scale: “It’s been alright,” he said.

“There’s a lot of stuff I have to work on. I feel like I’m not playing my best.”

He did have one forgettable evening, in the Tigers’ memorable win in November against Alabama, when he struggled to corral DeVonta Smith, who finished with 213 receiving yards and two scores. But that’s been the outlier in an otherwise superb season — and Stingley rebounded to limit receivers in coverage to just four receptions across the Tigers’ next three games.

“I still have to prove that I can be consistent,” Stingley said. “There’s a lot of times where I’ll be doing good but something will happen and I have to bounce back from that. So really, consistency.”

— But the hype is off the charts, and for good reason.

Even for a program so rich in tradition, Stingley represents the rare true freshman capable of shouldering a heavy load for a team two wins away from the national championship. He has the mental makeup. The physical gifts. He’s this good as a freshman, this vital to the Tigers’ hopes. As he winds to the end of this first year, the question isn’t whether Stingley can be one of the most accomplished defensive backs in program history — it’s whether the 18-year-old freshman can be the Tigers’ best ever.

“We want that,” Orgeron said. “We want that for him. I think he has a ways to go before he proves that. Can he get there? Sure. Can he surpass it? Sure.”

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