NFL Wag Admits She Sometimes Spends Games Hiding in Suite Bathroom (Exclusive)

Game day may thrill fans, but for players, coaches and their families, it comes with a heavy dose of nerves and uncertainty.

Holly Campbell, the wife of Detroit Lions head coach Dan Campbell, admits she’s “not calm” during the action — and relies on some quirky superstitions to get by.

When it comes to home games, the 50-year-old arrives at the stadium early and takes to the field an hour before kickoff for the ritual pre-match kiss between her and her husband.

In case Holly isn’t in attendance, the longtime couple makes sure to meet face-to-face before the first play.

“I mean, it has to be done,” Holly tells PEOPLE exclusively.

During games in Detroit, Holly watches and supports the team from a stadium suite – but not in the way most people might imagine.

“If things don’t go the way we want, I get sent to the bathroom,” she shares, noting that there is one in the sequel.

This superstitious routine gives him the feeling of having some control over what happens on the field.

“It’s like a break. I can just, you know, sit on the toilet and watch the game on ESPN and wait for the cheers so I can come out.”

Friends and family are all in – sending Holly into the booth when things aren’t going well, only calling her back for action once the team starts turning things around. “I mean, I can’t argue with it because it works,” she said.

But if things go wrong, Holly takes note of what she was wearing and puts the outfit “on ice for a while”, adding that it “won’t be worn anytime soon”.

Back in the day, when Dan played for the Detroit Lions from 2006 to 2008, Holly remembers wearing a bracelet with her husband’s number 89 on it.

At the time, however, the team was “losing and losing and losing,” she tells PEOPLE, but she still refused to take off the sentimental jewelry.

Determined to dispel any bad luck attached to it, Holly boiled it. “It’s crazy! It’s crazy to talk about it!” she said, pointing out that only other WAGs would be able to understand his quirks on game days.

“I think we won the next game after that,” Holly notes. “Then there must be something!”

For almost 20 years, Holly used to tell Dan to “do a good job” before every match, but that has since stopped.

The phrase comes from their first date, a movie night watching Armageddon. “I don’t know if you remember, every time they’re about to make the bomb or something, and Stevie Buscemi goes crazy… ‘Do a good job, do a good job,’ you know, so it explodes,” she recalled.

What started as a playful inside joke has become a long-standing tradition despite the rocky start to the Lions’ 2021 season, which was Dan’s first year in charge of the team.

At the time, the Lions suffered 10 losses before finally picking up a victory against the Minnesota Vikings.

“The day we won our first game, I forgot to say it – for the first time ever,” Holly says. “And it worked for him, so maybe it was me. All the time, it was me saying, ‘Do a good job.’ »

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Fortunately, this year the Lions are off to a good start with a 4-2 record.

After a shaky first game against the Green Bay Packers, they bounced back by dominating the Chicago Bears, Baltimore Ravens, Cleveland Browns and Cincinnati Bengals, with Holly saying they were ready to “go all the way.”