A playbook in American Football can consist of hundreds of plays, and to learn each play and the corresponding assignments and responsibilities is a big challenge for the players. In this paper we propose a teaching tool for coaches in American Football based on computer vision and visualization techniques which eases the learning process and helps the players gain deeper knowledge of the underlying concepts. Coaches can create, manipulate and animate plays with adjustable parameters which affect the player actions in the animation. The general player behaviors and interactions between players are modeled based on expert knowledge. The final goal of the framework is to compare the theoretical concepts with their practical implementation in training and game, by using computer vision algorithms which extract spatio-temporal motion patterns from corresponding real video material. First results indicate that the software can be used effectively by coaches and the players' understanding of critical moments of the play can be increased with the animation system.