Before every Detroit Lions home game, Holly Campbell stands on the side of Ford Field and makes sure she gets two kisses from her husband, Lions head coach Dan Campbell.
“It has to be done,” Campbell tells Glamour of the superstitious ritual the couple developed during the Lions’ record-breaking 2024 season.
The two-kiss tradition isn’t the only thing that’s new about this season. For the first time, cameras are following Campbell like she’s a celebrity and fans are eagerly following along
Though her husband’s career in the NFL as both a player and coach has spanned decades, it’s only recently that the notoriously private Campbell has willingly stepped into the limelight.
Now, she’s a rising Instagram star, with 80,000 followers gained in the past 6 months alone. The online response from fans has made two things clear: they love the Campbell family and and they want more Holly. The feeling is mutual, she says.
“I’m having fun,” the mother of two, who has been married to her husband since 1999, says. “I love interacting with the fans.”
The timing for Campbell’s rise also feels fated. For the second straight season, under her husband’s tenure, the team has risen to the top of their division, delighting its long-suffering fanbase and injecting positivity into the city.
Amidst the celebratory fans, it might be Campbell and her burgeoning following who are cheering loudest—and encouraging others to do the same.
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Holly Campbell never wanted or planned to be an Instagram star. In fact, she had always shunned the limelight, keeping her social media accounts private and avoiding the media, even turning down offers for reality TV shows.
For the first three years of her husband’s stint as head coach, as well as his 11 years as a tight end, which included three seasons in Detroit, Campbell stayed on the sidelines. Her plan was to remain largely anonymous because she wanted to ensure her now young adult children, Piper and Cody, had a normal life.
It wasn’t until 2024 that she began to reconsider. Despite her efforts at privacy, the family’s home address was leaked online, allegedly by her daughter’s classmate. The family ended up moving after being harassed by constant visitors at their home.
The situation caused Campbell a lot of anxiety, but became a pivotal shift in her perspective.
“After we had the whole doxxing thing, I was like ‘this isn’t working,’” she says of eschewing a public persona. “Let’s just see what happens if I lean into it.’”
At the start of the 2024 season, Campbell began to dip her toe into public waters. She’d intermittently switch her Instagram account to allow anyone to see it, but only when she wanted to highlight a charity or support local brands.
In October, after one such instance, Campbell couldn’t figure out how to get her account back to private despite trying for over a week.
“It’s not like every single time I went public I was getting inundated, so I was like, ‘Well, this isn’t so bad,’” she says.
Then came Oct. 26, and the moment that (almost) broke the internet. Campbell posted a split video of the couple’s two kiss pre-game sideline ritual using trending audio and wearing a brand called Crystal Rags, which reposted her.
“It went viral,” Campbell says of the clip which has amassed more than 1.7 million views and 33,000 likes. Before that video, Campbell was getting around 400 likes on her posts.
Campbell calls her leap to internet fame and the growth of her digital footprint “insane.” Through her shift in perspective, she realized that controlling her own narrative via social media could actually be empowering.
“I still am not comfortable in the spotlight, but since (my account) is on my terms and it was my decision, it does take away a layer of that anxiety,” she says.
And lean into it, she has, but with two important rules. “I don’t post anything that I would care if it just went everywhere,” she says. “And it needs to be authentic, so I’m really not posting anything different than I posted whenever I was private.”
In less than six months, Campbell’s account has skyrocketed to more than 83,000 followers.
A cursory glance of her feed offers just a glimpse behind the curtain of Detroit’s most beloved family. She posts a lot of coffee and lions (like, the actual animal) and of course, family snaps. Fans swarm to the comment section for more details nearly every time she shares something new, whether it’s what she’s wearing on game day or the family’s pets.
Beyond sharing more details of her life, it’s the way Campbell gives behind-the-scenes footage of her husband—humanizing the gritty coach best known for his aggressive sideline presence—that has endeared Detroit fans and beyond. In fact, it was a casual coffee photo that catapulted Campbell’s account to national headline status late last year the morning after a 52-6 blowout of the Jacksonville Jaguars.
In the quick snap of the couple grabbing their morning brew from Starbucks, it was the tiniest Campbell, their a teacup Yorkie Thelma, perched in her husband’s lap that stole the show.
“He’s tall enough that in his lap, she can look out the window,” Campbell says of Thelma, who quickly melted the internet and made headlines beyond Detroit.
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She also delighted in an Instagram story re-share from Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer. The governor co-signed a written request from a local elementary schooler to have Feb. 10 off if the Lions go to the Super Bowl.
While Campbell appreciates all the “fun” social media has brought for her, she says that her goal has never been to promote herself, but rather charities and businesses in the city she loves and calls home: Detroit.
“You don’t really hear a lot of great things about Detroit, but it’s wonderful, and the people are wonderful, and it’s just a great place to live,” she says, calling their return to the Motor City “a dream come true.”
As the 15-2 Lions enter the playoffs as the winningest regular-season team the franchise has ever seen with her husband at the helm, Campbell can’t help but beam and feel a little bit like life is coming full circle.
“He always said, if someone would come and make (Detroit) a winner, it would be crazy. It would be like…the most amazing thing,” Campbell says. “And so to see it happening, and for him to be the person who came back and did it – I mean, it makes you almost cry. It’s a fairytale. It’s magical. It’s amazing.”
The post Holly Campbell Is a New Kind of Wag—and Detroit Lions Fans Are Loving It appeared first on Glamour.
