It is executed prior to college football games as one of the rituals engaging the audience's consent[clarification needed] for the athletic contest that follows.
Folklorist Danille Lindquist has described the drum major backbend, and the audience reaction that accompanies it in the form of cheering and applause, as part of a series of rituals associated with college football designed to seek and elicit popular consent for the staging of the athletic contest that follows.
[2] The Ohio State University Marching Band (OSUMB) began executing a drum major backbend in the late 1950s with Lenny Hart being the first such person to do so.
[3] In 2016, OSUMB drum major Nate MacMaster described the backbend to Rolling Stone as the "most crucial moment" of game day.
[2][6][7][8] The drum major of the University of Oklahoma (OU) uses a highly modified backbend that involves only a partial inversion of the torso, held in place while simultaneously executing an elongated and affected fast walk across the field, known as "the strut".