ChiefsPlanet - Football WHITLOCK - DeBerg is a quarterback guru

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Former Chief DeBerg is a quarterback guru
By JASON WHITLOCK
The Kansas City Star

TAMPA, Fla. | Twenty minutes north of ground zero for Super Bowl XLIII, pop star Justin Timberlake unwinds, shortstop Derek Jeter prepares, quarterback Donovan McNabb recovers, and Michael Jordan plays a round of golf.

Tampa’s Saddlebrook Resort is the offseason home for the biggest and baddest entertainers America produces. The opulent paradise is a sanctuary for the wealthy. They flock here for the warm weather, the seclusion and the pampering.

Steve DeBerg comes here to work. He tutors quarterbacks. In the spring and summer he schools prep QBs in hopes of readying them for a college scholarship. This time of year, he prepares college QBs for the combine and NFL draft.

He’s paid handsomely. He’s developed a reputation as a QB guru. He’s the Butch Harmon of football. You know Butch Harmon, Tiger Woods’ former swing coach. DeBerg is the “fling” coach.

“The thing I teach the most is how to quick release the football with power, speeding up the delivery,” DeBerg said Thursday. “Why does Tiger Woods need a swing coach? He has the greatest swing there ever was. Sometimes you get a little out of sync and you can’t realize it yourself.

“A lot of quarterbacks don’t understand technique. Even most quarterback coaches don’t even know what the most advanced throwing techniques are. They teach. ‘This is who you’re supposed to throw it to and if you can’t do it, we’ll let Joe try it.’ At the NFL level there is so much strategy involved in preparing a quarterback to play that the technique part kind of gets overlooked.”

That’s where DeBerg comes in. Agents hire DeBerg to prep their clients. It’s why a kid might look like the second coming at the combine and look second fiddle at training camp. Kids are getting better coaching before the draft than after it.

You think Dick Curl knows more about proper technique than Steve DeBerg? Quarterback coaches teach assignments and read progressions. DeBerg teaches release point, peripheral vision, footwork, posture and follow-through.

DeBerg’s most famous client was Tony Romo, the Cowboys QB. DeBerg fell in love with Romo long before Bill Parcells. DeBerg thought Romo was worthy of a high draft pick. DeBerg taught Romo the high, compact, short-burst release that NFL analysts now love and compare to Brett Favre’s.

I drove up to Saddlebrook on Thursday because I wanted to talk quarterback play with DeBerg. Whenever the Chiefs get around to identifying a new coach, their next big decision will revolve around the QB position.

Is Tyler Thigpen a legitimate QB of the future? What should the Chiefs be looking for in a young QB?

DeBerg has spent most of his 55 years thinking about playing quarterback. He survived 17 years in the NFL because he mastered the little things about the position. He hatched an improbable return to the league at age 45, earning a spot on the 1998 Super Bowl Atlanta Falcons, thanks largely to his ability to help Atlanta’s other QBs prepare for games.

DeBerg knows the position. He’s played it at the highest level, most memorably as a Kansas City Chief in 1990, and coached the position for the New York Giants. He knows what the Chiefs should be looking for now.

“No. 1, you have to have accuracy,” DeBerg said. “You have to have a quick release. You have to have arm strength. You have to have intelligence.”

And then you have to get lucky.

“It’s just so hard to predict how a quarterback will handle the NFL,” DeBerg acknowledged. “Romo wasn’t drafted. How could everyone be wrong about him? Tom Brady, the best in the game, was a sixth-round pick. A lot of people were wrong about him.”

DeBerg said that within the last five years he nearly took a job with the Chiefs coaching quarterbacks. He remembers Kansas City fondly. In 1990 he threw 23 touchdowns and just four interceptions and led the Chiefs to an 11-5 record.

“Marty Schottenheimer is a great football coach,” DeBerg said without being prompted. “It would take a special situation for me to return to coaching. I just got married, and coaching is very hard on a marriage. It’s hard on a spouse.”

For now he satisfies his football fix training kids at Saddlebrook. His home is a 30-minute drive from Saddlebrook. He leaves each weekday at 7:30 a.m. and returns home by 5 p.m. A little later in the winter he starts working a double shift. He coaches high school kids at night.

It’s a good life.

“I’m off the entire fall during football season,” he said. “I get to travel and do whatever I want during the fall. I get to be a fan and follow the kids I coached. But I don’t get blamed for the losses.”