Free flag football play designer

Flag is not tackle with the linemen deleted

This is the thing almost every football tool gets wrong, and it is why this page exists separately from the American football play designer.

There is no down and distance in flag. The line to gain is a fixed line — midfield in the NFL FLAG format — rather than ten yards from wherever the last play ended, so "3rd and 7" is not a situation you can be in. You get four downs to cross that line and then a fresh set to score. There are no-run zones either side of it and in front of the end zone, where a run is simply not a legal call. There are no hash marks, so there is no strong side by field position. And in most rule sets the quarterback cannot run the ball at all, which means every single play is a route combination and every defender is in coverage.

Delete the linemen from a tackle playbook and none of that changes. Start from the flag rules and all of it does.

The stack is the first thing to draw

Two receivers standing one behind the other, on the same yard line, a metre apart. No defender can line up over both of them. Whichever way the front man releases, the back man goes the other, and the coverage has to sort out a switch on the run — with no contact allowed to help them do it.

It is the highest-value shape in 5v5 and it is far easier to see than to explain, which is exactly the case for animating it rather than drawing it. Load Flag 5v5 stack right, press play, and the picture makes the argument in four seconds. Then drag the back man's route somewhere else and watch what the defender in the middle has to do about it.

A real field, so the depths transfer

Playmaker draws the gridiron to the yard: a yard line every five, the end zone shaded above the goal line, and fifty yards of field so a route tree has all the room it needs. A flag field is narrower and shorter than a full gridiron, but a yard is a yard — a ten-yard out drawn here is the ten-yard out your team runs on Saturday.

What you get from that is depth you can coach. A five-yard slant is at five yards, a fourteen-yard comeback breaks at fourteen, and because football routes are the one thing in this app that are not smoothed into a curve, the cut stays a cut. The corner is the information in a route; it survives at the yard it was drawn on, in the editor, in the animation and in every export.

Mark the no-run zone yourself with a line where your league puts it, and it is in the picture your players are looking at.

What is on this page's shelf

Four starting shapes, two at five a side and two at seven, drawn on the real field:

• Flag 5v5 spread — a centre, a quarterback and three receivers as wide as the field allows. The baseline: no blocking, no back, everybody eligible.
• Flag 5v5 stack right — the shape above.
• Flag 7v7 trips right — three receivers to one side, which is how you make a defence declare what it is playing before the snap.
• Flag 7v7 bunch left — three in a cluster, for the crossing releases a zone cannot pass off cleanly.

Every one of them opens from the Formations button inside the designer. Load it, move the players your team does differently, and draw the routes from there.

Then print the wristband, which is the other half of a playbook

A flag playbook that lives on a phone is a playbook nobody can read at the line. The free football wristband maker turns your play list into a numbered insert for the vinyl window on a wrist coach — 12 STACK RT SWITCH, the quarterback shouts "twelve", everybody reads the same row — and prints the coach's situational call sheet from the same list, on one page.

The flag call sheet is built from the flag rules rather than from the tackle sheet with sections removed: four downs to the line to gain, the no-run zones, and the situations that actually exist in this game. It is free, there is no account, and the insert sizes were measured off the band manufacturers' own printable templates so the card fits the window you already own.

If you want the reading behind a first playbook rather than the tools, start with how to build a flag football playbook — six plays, why those six, and how to install them in two practices.