Advice by the Slice: Football Season Is Pizza Season

Advice by the Slice

The season kicked off September 9. The regular season alone gives your shop eighteen Sundays where half your delivery zone is planning dinner around a kickoff time, and the playoffs add a month on top of that. Most operators treat all of it as one big day in February.

Eighteen Sundays, Not One

Every pizzeria in America knows about Super Bowl Sunday. Fewer build anything around the five months leading up to it, which is where the actual money is. One February evening is a great night. Eighteen consecutive Sundays with a built-in reason to order pizza is a season.

The advantage of a long run is that you get to repeat yourself. A promotion you run once has to be explained. A promotion you run every Sunday from September through January becomes something your regulars plan around, which is the whole point.

Build One Bundle and Leave It Alone

The instinct on a big night is to discount. Resist it. Gameday already brings the traffic, so the job is not getting people to order, it is getting a bigger order out of the people who were going to call anyway.

Name it, price it, and let it sit on your menu all season. Two large pizzas, a dozen wings, and a 2-liter at one number. Customers do not have to think about it, your staff does not have to explain it, and you are not training anyone to wait for a sale. Put it on the homepage of your online ordering, on the phone hold message, and on a window sign that stays up until January.

Wings Are the Attachment

If you sell one thing harder this season, sell wings. One industry analysis compared the first NFL Sunday of 2024 against average Sundays earlier that year and found wing sales up 25% across restaurants nationwide. Seafood and Mexican dishes were both down 16% on the same day. People are not shopping for dinner on a Sunday in the fall. They are stocking a coffee table.

That changes what a good upsell sounds like. "Want to add wings?" is a question. "Add a dozen wings and a 2-liter for $12" is an offer, and it is the one that moves a $24 ticket to $36 without touching the price of a single pizza.

Nobody orders pizza on a Sunday in October because they are hungry. They order because kickoff is in forty minutes and the house is filling up.

Move the Rush Before It Moves You

Gameday demand is not spread out. It stacks against a kickoff time everyone in your zone already knows, and it will bury a kitchen that waits for it. The fix is timing, not staffing.

Take orders early. Send a text or email Saturday night with the bundle and a link, let customers schedule a pickup or delivery window for Sunday afternoon, and you convert a wall of 11:45 phone calls into a production schedule you can actually cook against. The order you take on Saturday is the one you are not scrambling to answer on Sunday.

What to Do This Week

Four things, none of which take longer than an afternoon.

1. Build one gameday bundle at a fixed price and give it a name people can say out loud.
2. Put it in front of every ordering channel you own, including the phone hold message.
3. Schedule the Saturday text and email now, once, for every remaining week of the season.
4. Turn on scheduled ordering so customers can lock in a kickoff-time delivery window.

Do it this week and it runs itself until January. Wait until February and you will have spent the best stretch of the year selling one pizza at a time.