Videos of three NFL quarterbacks sharing personal time with their significant others on the field at training camp have gone viral in the last week: Justin Herbert with fiancée Madison Beer, Joe Burrow with rumored girlfriend Olivia Ponton, and Jaxson Dart with girlfriend Marissa Ayers.
Sports Twitter has questioned the rapid succession of tender training-camp content, noting that player partners have not previously had such a visible role in preseason activities.
These moments, it turns out, are at least partly coordinated. The viral canoodling-at-camp videos are part of a larger content campaign, a source close to the NFL told Front Office Sports.
It clearly fits the NFL’s recent efforts to reach women and girls, and is part of the league’s “helmets-off” marketing effort.
“On the league and club level, we’ve engaged our players’ families and loved ones for years,” Ian Trombetta, the NFL’s SVP of social and influencer marketing, told FOS. “Whether it’s Training Camp, weekly practice or a major event like the Super Bowl, we look for authentic opportunities to highlight our players and the people who are part of their journey … The content is authentic, genuine and relatable, and that’s resonated strongly with women and young fans, who are key growth audiences for the NFL.”
The NFL also shared with FOS it has been “scaling up its female-focused content,” and “will be doing even more in the future”—especially with the Los Angeles 2028 Olympics on the horizon, where women’s flag football will be played for the first time. In December 2025, NFL clubs approved a $32 million investment to develop and launch a professional flag football league that will feature both male and female athletes. Several NFL teams have also allocated millions of dollars to local girls’ flag programs.
All Gen Z and professional content creators, Ayers, Ponton, and Beer are among the highest-profile NFL romantic partners—perhaps behind only Taylor Swift and Simone Biles. (Beer is also a pop musician.) Collectively, the trio has more than 70 million followers across Instagram and TikTok; the NFL, comparatively, has 53 million combined followers across both platforms.
When Herbert and Beer got engaged in late July, the NFL shared Beer’s photos of the proposal to its own Instagram account in a post that garnered more than 500,000 likes. According to digital analytics site Social Blade, that’s roughly 10 times more than the average NFL Instagram post nets.
Female audiences in the NFL have already grown, thanks in no small part to Swift, whose relationship with Travis Kelce made the music star into a regular fixture at Chiefs games and on broadcasts beginning in 2023. Merch sales, too, have swelled among female consumers.
This latest partner-centric content push by the league comes as the nature of sports fandom expands, particularly among young people: Research published by USC Annenberg and Acceleration Community of Companies in July showed that approximately half (49%) of Gen Zers become interested in a new sport or athlete because of viral online content or something entirely outside the sport—like an athlete’s relationship.
