DeMario Douglas grinned as he faced the raucous New England Patriots crowd from the end zone at Gillette Stadium.
He didn’t have to think about what was coming next.
Seconds after scoring the first touchdown of the Patriots’ eventual AFC divisional round win on Jan. 18 against the Houston Texans, Douglas raised his left hand to his red face mask, covering his mouth and nose. At the same time, he extended his right arm in front of him, turned his palm sideways and waved it back and forth as the crowd roared and did the motion back at him. Behind him, teammate Hunter Henry mimicked the moves, too.
Nicknamed “the Zombieland,” the celebration has accompanied some of the biggest moments of the Patriots’ season en route to Super Bowl LX, but its origin is rooted 1,000 miles away and three years ago in Bowling Green, Kentucky, where a pair of Western Kentucky defensive backs came up with the move as they posed for pictures at a team media day in 2022. Since then, the celebration has crisscrossed the country from Western Kentucky to Washington State to the Miami Hurricanes to the NFL thanks to an upwardly mobile offensive coordinator, a future No. 1 draft pick and social media.
And now, nearly 3½ years after its inception, the celebration could hit the worldwide stage at Levi’s Stadium as the Patriots take on the Seattle Seahawks in Sunday’s Super Bowl (6:30 p.m. ET, NBC).
“It’s just crazy,” former Western Kentucky wide receiver Daewood Davis told ESPN. “Just to see something we created in a practice in Bowling Green, Kentucky, just having fun playing football and now it’s one of the top celebrations in the world for high schoolers, for college, for NFL, for celebrities, man. It’s such a surreal moment for us.”
Though Davis admits he wasn’t the original creator of the Zombieland, he became the first player to do it on national TV when he scored against the Indiana Hoosiers in a game televised by the Big Ten Network on Sept. 17, 2022.
“I found the camera, and I did the celebration,” Davis said.
Though Davis’ moment contributed significantly to the movement, the celebration was first done by a pair of his Western Kentucky teammates a couple of weeks earlier during a practice.
The way Davis remembers it, cornerbacks Upton Stout and Kahlef Hailassie, now with the San Francisco 49ers and Minnesota Vikings, respectively, were experimenting with poses during the team’s picture day, and it inexplicably spawned, the way inside jokes often do.
“It just happened between them at first,” Davis said. “It’s the thing they started doing as two brothers on the defense, and then it just caught fire with everybody.
“… I noticed it, and I was like, ‘Hey, man, that’s kind of cool.’ So I started doing it, and then this became a culture.”
So what does the Zombieland mean? Well, that’s up for debate. According to Davis, there are two primary explanations. The first: that the play by your opponent “stinks like the rotting flesh of a zombie.” The second, he said, is that “we treated ourselves like ‘The Walking Dead.'”
“We was unstoppable,” Davis said. “We just started calling it the Zombieland. As you can see, it kind of mimics the zombie in a way that you hold your hand out, you wave it, because in every depiction of the movies, that’s how zombies walk.
“Then we cover our mouth or put our hand over our face to simulate that. So that’s where the whole of it began, that we was unstoppable as a team, as a unit, and then as players.”
During the 2025 football season, the Hilltoppers debuted alternate matte black helmets featuring Big Red, the school’s mascot, doing the celebration and wore them against FIU in a midweek game aired on ESPNU.
Big Red did it again 🫢🫳 pic.twitter.com/kuUpmKUWvJ
— WKU Football (@WKUFootball) October 9, 2025
A year after its inception, the Zombieland jumped conferences and time zones when then-Western Kentucky offensive coordinator Ben Arbuckle took a job as the OC and quarterbacks coach at Washington State in 2023 and began working with Cam Ward.
As the coach and quarterback watched compilations of Arbuckle’s offensive concepts at WKU, the recurring celebration caught Ward’s eye. He liked it so much he started to incorporate it into his own mix of celebratory moves.
The Zombieland expanded its footprint even more in 2024 as Ward transferred to Miami and put together a Heisman Trophy-winning season as a dynamic, must-watch playmaker. Between the nationally televised games and the social media highlights, the Zombieland infected the entire country.
Check the date I ain’t say nothing this whole time influenced the whole world with this celebration yall keep having fun with it just know where it first started from 🔥🦅🤞🏽 https://t.co/J1IIgUvgjj
— Kahlef Hailassie (@YoungLeaf24) October 11, 2024
Davis was sitting at home watching college football with his wife a few days after signing a contract with the Memphis Showboats, a UFL squad, when he saw Ward break out the Zombieland on TV.
“I was like, ‘Hold on. That looked like our celebration. That’s crazy,'” Davis said. “And then it just took off. It kind of blew up. I was very happy that something me and my brothers created can become so popular.”
Patriots rookie kicker Andy Borregales had a similar thought earlier this NFL season. Borregales spent his college career at Miami and watched Ward’s celebration in person during his record-setting 2024 campaign. Then, he felt a pang of déjà vu when he saw teammate Stefon Diggs break out the same dance after scoring a touchdown against the Cleveland Browns in Week 8 — but there was a twist. The Hilltoppers’ original celebration, the one adopted by 2025 No. 1 pick Ward, features an extended arm with the palm facing down and a vertical wave, like a shooing motion.
Diggs, though, rotated his palm 90 degrees and waved his hand side to side.
“First time I saw it I was like, ‘You got your hand wrong,'” Borregales said with a laugh. “But I kind of just let it go. It’s kind of ironic that I was in the team that did it last year, and now I’m on the team that’s doing it this year, which is crazy to even think about.
“It’s something that I guess is following me.”
Like the spontaneous creation of the move itself, Diggs isn’t sure exactly how or when the Zombieland entered his consciousness.
As far as the wide receiver can remember, he started doing it in Buffalo, where he played from 2020 to 2023. But what started as an infrequent celebration became a staple once he joined the Patriots in 2025.
“I’m on the internet a little bit,” Diggs said, explaining how he found the Zombieland. “I thought it was fitting. … I’m out there just trying to have fun or bring a lot of energy and bring some swag. I take a little bit of credit. I’m a small piece of the puzzle.”
Diggs, known for a range of catchy celebrations throughout his 11-year pro career, didn’t even know the celebration had a name. Neither did several of his teammates, but that didn’t stop it from becoming a Patriots — and NFL — staple.
Stefon Diggs has jokes 😂
(via @Patriots) pic.twitter.com/Hh9Pwkkgg6
— NFL (@NFL) November 3, 2025
“When Stef did it, that’s big,” Douglas said. “He’s a known person. A lot of people watch him and probably base their game off his. So when he did it, it went huge.”
A week after scoring his first touchdown of the season against the Browns, Diggs found the end zone again at home against the Atlanta Falcons in Week 9. This time, Cardi B, a superstar rapper and Diggs’ girlfriend, sat in a suite next to team owner Robert Kraft and celebrated with the Zombieland as Diggs scored. After the game, she mimicked the walking dead again as she posed next to Diggs for a picture on the field.
“When Steph does something, it just adds a lot of aura to it,” said Patriots wide receiver Kyle Williams, who learned the Zombieland with Ward at Washington State in 2023. “So we just kept that thing going. And I mean, now it could be a national movement if you think about it.”
Truth be told, Diggs wasn’t the first Patriots player to perform the celebration. Douglas started using it as a first-down celebration during the 2024 season after his TikTok algorithm fed him a stream of college players doing the dance. Then, in a Week 6 game against the Texans, Douglas broke it out to celebrate scoring his first career touchdown after he noticed one fan doing the Zombieland in his direction.
“I really just stood there, and I was like, ‘Dang, this is crazy,'” Douglas said. “And then I saw the fan low key do it, so I did it back to him. So I just went and waved it.”
Even if the Patriots find themselves without any touchdowns to celebrate Sunday, the Zombieland might still find the spotlight inside Levi’s Stadium. Seahawks returner Rashid Shaheed is among numerous NFL players who have incorporated the move this season. Shaheed was among the early adopters of the Zombieland because he was briefly college teammates with Hailassie.
“It’s kind of like a silencer,” Shaheed said. “You want to silence the crowd, silence the noise, silence the critics, and I feel like that’s kind of what it could be used for.”
But the Patriots, though, are certain they’re going to be the ones doing the silencing with their Zombieland celebrations in Super Bowl LX.
“We don’t hope it’s going to be there,” Williams said. “It’s going to be there.”
