Kansas City is Pizza Hut Country, and the Chiefs’ fans know it. Patriots fans and Rams fans alike love Domino’s. Little Caesars performs best in Detroit while Papa John’s has a lot of fans in Indy and DC.

Super Bowl LIII, featuring the (so-frequently featured in the postseason) New England Patriots and the Los Angeles Rams, is happening so soon we can taste it. As occurs in mouths from Dorchester to Santa Monica on a daily basis, but will be taking place to an inordinate degree on Super Sunday 2019, is the tasting of pizza. We can all taste that, no matter the time of year. Are we right, or are we right?

For the past couple of weeks we’ve been applying the sharp and powerful StatSocial audience analysis tool to the important work of learning all sorts of things about every NFL team’s fans. We’ve uncovered which team’s fans are most emotional, most (or least) Millennial, and we dug into their preferences when it comes to pizza’s most perfect pairing — provided you’re over 21-years of age — good ol’ brewskis. You can check out all the entries we’ve done, and will do, in this series at the StatSocial blog here.

“Hey pizza! It’s great! Let’s dig in!”

-Dee Dee Ramone, ‘Rock and Roll High School’

You scream, I scream, we all scream for pizza. The lack of a rhyme doesn’t make this fact any less true.

Setting aside our New York elitism, and loyalty to the literal hundreds upon hundreds of genuinely mind-blowing mom ’n’ pop pizza joints that can be found virtually every few blocks within our city (and many others, we know that other cities have great pizza too… or at least we’ve been told as much), today we focus on our great nation’s major pizza chains: Domino’s, Pizza Hut, Papa John’s, and Little Caesars.

The below graphic reflects our calculations after looking at hundreds of thousands of each NFL team’s fans who are also fans of one of the four pizza chains in question. With those fans identified, we were able to determine the proportions of each chain’s admirers dwelling within each team’s fan base.

Observe….

It’s close, but Pizza Hut is the victor here. Domino’s is not at all far behind, though. Papa John’s is in the game, but is still comfortably our bronze medalist.

Little Caesars is coming up the rear. The chain does, however, get a pronounced regional boost. Founded in the Detroit metropolitan area’s Garden City, Michigan, the Lions find the largest proportion of Little Caesars admirers among their fans.

Of course, Domino’s pizza was founded in the Detroit suburb of Ypsilanti, Michigan, and it finds an even larger proportion of diners among the Lions fans. A proportion, however, only a smidge larger than that which grooves on Wichita, Kansas’ Pizza Hut. Home team pride is real, but at the end of the day, the heart (and the stomach) wants what it wants.

While speaking of Kansas and the international pizza chain to which it did give birth, we find the team with the largest proportion of Hut-worshipers located right over the border from the Jayhawk State, in the Show Me State. Fans of the Chiefs reside in both states, of course, and it would seem a heck of a coincidence if the Pizza Hut chain’s geographic origins weren’t something of a factor here.

Where Domino’s is kicking the most butt — if you’ll pardon our French — is within the region of our beautiful country called New England. Fans of the Patriots love Domino’s while admiring their local foliage, and they adore it while digging their cars out from under three feet of snow for the 20th time that year. Oh, and also while celebrating their team’s frequent divisional, conference, and yes even league championship victories.

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We’re not through here yet.

We’ll be visiting even more subjects of this general nature — all highlighting the rich and varied affinities of each NFL team’s fans — in these last few days in the run up to Super Bowl LIII.

And check out the written matter in the footer, and reach out to us if you have any questions or would like to see much, much more.

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