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

Game day might 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 leans on a few quirky superstitions to get through it.

When it comes to home games, the 50-year-old arrives at the stadium early and heads down to the field an hour before kickoff for her and her husband’s ritual pregame kiss.

In the off chance that Holly’s not in attendance, the longtime couple makes sure to FaceTime each other before the first play.

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

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

“If things are not going our way, I get sent to the bathroom,” she shares, noting there’s one inside the suite.

The superstitious routine helps her feel like she has a sliver of control over what’s happening on the field.

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

Friends and family fully lean into it — sending Holly into the stall when things aren’t looking good, only calling her back out for the action once the team starts turning things around. “I mean, I can’t argue with it because it works,” she says.

But if things go south, Holly takes note of what she was wearing and puts the outfit “on ice for a while,” adding that it’s “not being worn any time soon.”

Back in the day, when Dan played for the Detroit Lions from 2006 to 2008, Holly recalls 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 still, she refused to take off the sentimental piece of jewelry.

Determined to melt away any bad luck attached to it, Holly boiled it. “It’s crazy! It’s crazy to talk about it!” she says, emphasizing that only other WAGs would be able to understand her game-day quirks.

“I think we won the next game after that,” Holly notes. “So there’s gotta be something to it!”

For nearly 20 years, Holly used to tell Dan to “do a good job” before each game, but that has since stopped.

The phrase came from their first date, a movie night watching Armageddon. “I don’t know if you remember, whenever they’re about to do the bomb or whatever, and Stevie Buscemi’s going nuts… ‘Do a good job, do a good job,’ you know, so that it’ll blow up,” she recalls.

What started as a playful inside joke became a long-standing tradition despite the Lions’ tough start to the 2021 season, which was Dan’s first year leading the team.

At the time, the Lions endured 10 losses before finally securing a win 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’s worked out for him, so maybe it was me. The whole time, it was me saying, ‘Do a good job.’ ”

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Luckily, this year, the Lions are off to a roaring start with a 4–2 record.

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