Today's Tidbit... Fred Folsom and the Bucking Strap

Back when Twitter existed -it worked early this morning- I responded to a tweet by Pigskin Dispatch about Dartmouth's football history, and my response included an image of a bucking strap, at which point I realized I had not discussed that great tool in a previous Tidbit, so here goes.

Football coaches look for tools to simulate the action occurring on a football field and/or enhance players' ability to execute specific tasks. Tackling dummies, blocking sleds, and ladders, as well as the bucking strap, are examples of such tools.

Before discussing the bucking strap, however, we must introduce its inventor, Fred Folsom, and the nature of football when he developed the tool. Folsom played at Dartmouth from 1892 to 1894 during the height of the mass and momentum era. He then coached Colorado for seven of the next eight years before taking over the Dartmouth program for four years. After that, he went back to Colorado for another eight-year run. Folsom won eighty percent of the games he coached between the two schools. Colorado's Folsom Field is named in his honor.

Fred Folson during the era of the bucking strap’s invention. (1908 Dartmouth Aegis)

Throughout Folsom's playing and coaching career, ball carriers running between the tackles were said to "buck" the line, and a misdirection play faking the buck and giving the ball to a back heading to the other side of the center was a crossbuck.