Smile Politely

Smile Politely‘s Pizza Tournament: Round of 32

Yesterday, we revealed this year’s Smile Politely Pizza Tournament bracket, which kicks off our (somewhat) annual tournament of things locally that are not basketball. A tournament of unusual methodology which places people, places, and things up against one another for all of our amusement and entertainment and debate. Here’s a look back at 2019 and 2020. We took a break in 2021 because, uh, pandemic.

This year, we’re going there: a pizza bracket. Yes, we realize this is hard to wrap your mind around, considering there are so many different variations of pizza defined by so many different folks out there. Sure, we could’ve separated it by style, or by type, or whatever, but we’re not going to do that here and that’s OK.

With your help (we asked readers across our social media channels), combined with polling our group of editors, and some other random folks who know pizza in this here community, we’ve put together a bracket of 32 joints in and around C-U that serve pizza. We’re throwing variation out the window and leveling the playing field for a tourney, meaning, if a restaurant, bar, or establishment serves a pizza on their regular menu, they’re eligible. We collated what we learned from our readership and combined that with some lists, and landed here.

Our 32 team pizza showdown starts today, as you can vote below for what you deem to be the best pizza for each matchup. We’re talking overall quality here, comprehensively, for each match up. Once again, this should be fun, so don’t take it too seriously.

As always, if you have questions, or simply want to give us a piece of your mind, contact us at info@smilepolitely.com.

Follow along on our social media channels to see progress as the tourney moves forward. Voting for this round closes Wednesday, March 23rd at 5:00 p.m. CST. Thanks for participating and enjoy!

Image by Smile Politely. Right click and open in a new window to expand. Click here to view a horizontally-oriented version of the bracket.
 
Top image by Justine Bursoni.

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