Football has landed — gridiron, flag, and free wristband printing

American football is on the canvas, and it arrived with the thing football coaches actually ask for first: the printout.

The field is measured in yards, because football is

Fifty yards from a goal line back to the 50, at the real 160 ft of width. A yard line every five yards, hash marks 53 ft 4 in in from each sideline, the numbers twelve yards in and reading up the sideline the way they are painted, and the ten-yard end zone shaded above the goal line.

Fifty yards rather than a hundred is deliberate. A whole field is more than twice as tall as it is wide, which fits a screen by shrinking your players to dots. A route tree lives inside twenty-five yards of the line of scrimmage, so the snap goes on the 25 and the end zone stays in the frame doing work.

Routes keep their cuts

Every other sport here has its movement smoothed, because a run drawn with a finger is a noisy line. Football is the exception, and it is the whole point of a football diagram: a slant, a post and an out are the same two straight legs with a different angle between them. The cut is the information. So on the gridiron a dragged route is drawn as the route you dragged — five and break in, twelve and up — at the yard you drew it, in the editor and in every export.

Ten templates, four of them flag

I formation, shotgun trips, five wide, singleback spread, goal line heavy and a cover two shell for the defence. Then flag: 5v5 spread, 5v5 stack right, 7v7 trips right and 7v7 bunch left.

Flag is not eleven-a-side with players removed, so it is not treated that way. The line to gain is a fixed line rather than ten yards from the last play, there are no-run zones, there are no hash marks, and in most rule sets the quarterback cannot run — which means every play is a route combination. There is a page of its own for it now, at /flag-football-play-designer, and a guide on building a first flag playbook with two plays you can press play on.

The wristband and the call sheet, free, no account

This is the one every football app leads with, and every one of them charges for. Ours does not.

The football wristband maker takes a typed list of play calls and prints two things from it: a numbered insert for the vinyl window on a wrist coach, and the coach's one-page situational call sheet. No signup, no trial, nothing to install.

Some detail worth knowing, because it is the difference between a card that fits your band and one that goes in the bin:

• The insert sizes are measurements, and the product each came from is printed beside it. The strongest of them were taken from the printable templates the band manufacturers publish themselves, by measuring the page box of their own PDFs.
• The grid is arithmetic, not a preference. Twelve calls on a varsity insert prints two columns of six at eleven point; sixty prints three columns of twenty at seven point, which is the smallest type any manufacturer sets in their own templates and therefore the floor here. It tells you the grid and the type size before you print.
• The call sheet really does fit on one page — the layout tries both orientations and every row height down to a legibility floor, and if your list is too long it says so, and by how many.
• The flag call sheet is built from the flag rulebook, not from the tackle sheet with sections deleted. Four downs to the line to gain, the no-run zones, and the situations that exist in that game.

Print at 100% with "fit to page" switched off, and check the scale bar on the sheet against a ruler. Once, for your printer, and then never again.

And a page for the coaches searching for this

Free football play designer and free flag football play designer are both live, along with a page for each of the ten templates and an honest, dated comparison of the football tools — nine of them, with what each free tier really allows and what the paid plans cost, read off each vendor's own page.

Draw something. It opens on a real field and it costs nothing.