Welcome To Football Times!

In 1998, when I was trying to coach one my intramural teams, it was hard to explain to them the difference between man and zone defense without visuals. I worked for a computer company making websites, so I made a website called Football Times and sent them the links to the zone vs man defense. Football Times was born!

Welcome All Football Players, Coaches, Strategists!

Welcome home all backyard and playground football players! Welcome all flag football players! Welcome all tackle players! Welcome all coaches and organized football players! We are committed to giving you a place on the internet to call home. Please feel free to peruse our site, join our community and support our effort to provide the everyday football player an internet resource.

Free Football Plays, Playbooks, Resources, Forums

Here you will find resources for flag football players, tackle football plays, formations, playbooks, a section for coaches, and all kinds of useful articles to help you improve your game. Whether you are an expert offensive mind looking for new plays or a beginner trying to learn the lingo and basics of football, we are your new home.

Football Times  has finally taken off and should be flying high pretty soon. Riding on the coattails of Paintball Times, we feel that we have the staff, expertise, and experience to duplicate the success of Paintball Times for football players.

Paintball Times born back in 1993, and Football Times is just in it's infancy. With the proper marketing and enough resources we should be able to create enough exclusive material to produce a very unique and successful website, especially with the backing of Paintball Times.

We hope you enjoy your stay and tell all your friends about us. We appreciate all the referrals and the larger our community gets, the better for all of us. The more minds we have discussing football, the better!

Humble Beginnings

Football times began as a pet project in 1998 as a way to teach my football teams proper man vs zone defense techniques and gap assignments. I would send them links to the website and articles to read from the website. Diagrams and pictures were worth 1000 words. My teams consistently dominated on the football fields and won hundreds of games and championships.

By 2001, the website had a lively forum and some of the greatest coaches in football were in our forums and discussing the details of the Wing T versus the Spread Option vs how to defend the Option. It was glorious! We eventually moved online to Facebook groups and eventually onto messaging apps.

Most Active Football Forums Online

The website and forums took a bit of a hiatus while I was in medical school, but has since been resurrected. Despite my lack of involvement in the forums, the forums took off like crazy!

Owner Operator & CEO Of Football Times

I'm Dr. Alo. When I first started the website, I was still in college and applying to medical schools. I began playing football when I was first able to walk in the early 1980s! And have been playing and coaching at various levels since then! I have played football from when I was about5 years old and into my mid forties in various adult leagues. Whether it's Friday Night Lights in Northwest Ohio, to College Game day, to a bunch of friends in the annual Thanksgiving bowl. It's always been my passion. I have coached at nearly every level except college. I have been coaching and playing in inner city leagues in Chicago, to Chicago's suburbs, and then back to Northwest Ohio where I was raised! It's been a wild and fun ride.

I have been an avid writer and publisher, and my staff and coaches at Football Times have published several books on Football coaching. Everything from flag football to tackle football. I get to combine two of my passions, coaching and writing! I have been blessed as a great educator, and hence enjoy teaching football as well as medicine.

Who Am I

I am the owner and operator of FootballTimes.org. Football Times began in 1998 as an online forum for coaches to discuss football. At one point, we had the largest collection of football coaches in our forums discussing strategies, plays, rules, and everything football. Eventually, we moved to Facebook Groups and pages and eventually apps on your phone. Football Times was where coaches went to learn football, how to coach it, read articles on football, and download playbooks to use with instructions on how to use them.

It was an amazing place for thousands of football coaches from all over the world! They uploaded videos, articles, strategies, and had in depth discussions. Many amazing offensive and defensive strategies were born out of our forums.

I have a staff of football coaches, writers, editors, and developers. We’ve spent the last 40 years researching football, gathering playbooks, developing plays, explaining plays, reading every football book that’s ever been written, and playing football. We’ve spent a combined forty years as football coaches on the field with our teammates, and later on the sidelines coaching every level of play.

I have had access to some of the most amazing football coaches in the country! I have interviewed and spoken to coaches who have set records at the junior and high school levels.

Much of my coaching philosophy comes from Coach John T. Reed and Bob Ladouceur. Coach Bob had the longest active winning streak in high school football history that still stands today. They won 151 games in a row, breaking the previous win streak record of 72 wins. I highly recommend you purchase their books and study them.

Don’t get me wrong, high school football doesn’t translate into youth football. I am not suggesting that. High school football is not youth football. They are not the same. But the philosophies and coaching can be quite similar.

I am also a cardiologist and certified personal trainer. I currently coach the Southview Football Junior Cougars in Sylvania, Ohio. The Cougars are a tackle football team. I have coached flag football as well for many years and still do.

I began playing football at age 8 growing up in Sylvania, Ohio. Ohio is the birthplace of football and the cradle of many incredible coaches that have gone on to become world renowned coaches. Coaches like Nick Saban, Urban Meyer, Gary Pinkle, Brady Hoke, Brian Kelly, and hundreds of others. I grew up in Northwest Ohio where most of these coaches got their start.

My philosophy on offense most closely resembles that of Urban Meyers’ philosophy. Get the ball to your playmakers. Find every way to get the ball to the players that can make plays and are better than everyone else. Every year, we have one or two special playmakers.

I have taken the best offensive and defensive philosophies and have implemented and improved them in “The Lab” over the past 15 years. The lab is the football field with actual players, coaches, referees, and parents. You have to improve in all facets of football.

I am a scientist first and foremost. As a cardiologist, my job is to analyze data, studies, research, and numbers. I am an Economist by education. My undergraduate degree was Economics: the study of decision making. We use this skill every day in medicine and in football. In my other coaching books, I stress the importance of using data and statistics to tip the odds in your favor for winning. Put your players in the best possible position to win the game. We never make mistakes on decision making and statistics. There will never be a clock mismanagement issue or anything silly.

Using science, data, and statistics to win football games (and soccer games, see my soccer coaching book) is my philosophy. It usually works. There are some cases and some years where it doesn’t, but I have a pretty successful track record. Data > Feelings.

Many of us have experience coaching flag football. But again, flag is not tackle. Kids love flag. They hate being tackled to the ground. They hate getting hit. This is normal. Getting over the fear of hitting is important.

These are my two sons. One is about to graduate high school, the other is still playing junior level football. I have had the honor of coaching both. My older son came back to help me coach this year since he knows my plays, my philosophy, my blocking techniques, and tackling drills. A lot has changed since 1980, but the fundamentals are always the same!