Flag football tournament bracket maker
Enter your teams and fields. You get pools, a seeded single-elimination bracket with byes for the top seeds, and a game-day schedule that says who plays when and on which field. Print it, download it or share it. Free, no sign-up.
How this bracket maker works
List your teams best first. If you don't have a ranking, press Random draw to shuffle them. The tool then builds whichever format you pick. Our guide to making a tournament bracket walks through the same steps by hand.
- Pool play, then a bracket is the usual flag football format. Teams are snake-seeded into pools so each pool gets a similar mix. Every team plays its whole pool. Then the top finishers are seeded into a bracket: pool winners first, then runners-up. Teams from the same pool are kept apart in the first round wherever possible.
- Single elimination is the fastest. Seed 1 plays the lowest seed, 1 and 2 can only meet in the final, and the top seeds get the byes when your team count isn't a power of two.
- Round robin has everyone play everyone. You can end it with a final between the top two, or semifinals for the top four.
The game-day schedule fills every field each time slot with the next game that's ready. Bracket games wait until the games feeding them have finished. The rest setting decides whether a team ever plays two slots in a row. Each game gets a number, so the bracket can say "Winner G5" and everyone on the sideline knows which game that is.
Picking a format for your field time
Fields and daylight decide the format more than anything else. One field running 40-minute games with a 5-minute turnover gets through about 10 games in a 9-to-5 day. Ten teams in three pools, with the top two from each pool making the bracket, is 17 games, so you need two fields. Single elimination for the same ten teams is only 9 games, but about half the teams go home after one game. That's the trade-off the single elimination vs round robin guide covers. If the estimated finish time comes out too late, add a field, shorten the games or have fewer teams advance.
Tiebreakers for pool play
Publish these before the first game. A common order is: win-loss record, then head-to-head, then fewest points allowed, then point differential, then a coin toss. Points allowed beats points scored as a tiebreaker because it doesn't reward running up the score on weaker teams. If you cap the margin (say, 21 points per game), say so in your house rules.
What it doesn't do
This tool draws the bracket and the schedule. It doesn't fill in winners as games finish, move games when a field runs late, or tell parents who's playing next. On tournament day, that's the hard part. ReadyRef's Tournament Wizard schedules single-elimination and round-robin tournaments on your real fields and time slots, gives the top seeds their byes, and adds a third-place game if you want one. Referees score every game in the app, and families can watch it live.
Frequently asked questions
How many games are in a single-elimination tournament?
One fewer than the number of teams, because every game eliminates exactly one team. Eight teams play 7 games, 12 teams play 11 and 16 teams play 15. A third-place game adds one more.
Who gets the byes in a tournament bracket?
The top seeds. When the team count isn't a power of two (4, 8, 16, 32), the bracket fills up to the next one with byes, and the highest seeds skip the first round. Ten teams in a 16-team bracket means seeds 1 to 6 get byes and seeds 7 to 10 play in.
How are teams split into pools?
By snake seeding. With three pools, seeds 1, 2 and 3 go to pools A, B and C, then seeds 4, 5 and 6 go to C, B and A, and so on. Every pool gets a similar mix of strong and weaker teams.
How long will my flag football tournament take?
Divide the number of games by the number of fields to get the time slots, then multiply by the game length plus the turnover. Rest rules and bracket games that wait on earlier results add slots. This tool works it out and shows the estimated finish time.
Is my data saved or uploaded?
No. Everything is worked out in your browser and nothing is sent to a server. A share link stores your inputs in the part of the URL after the #, which browsers never send to the website.