Best pizza for football fans.(Up front: news / trends / advice)

While quarterbacks are passing the ball, Super Bowl viewers are passing the pizza. The Domino's pizza chain alone typically sells 1.2 million pies nationwide on Super Bowl Sunday, a 42 percent rise over the usual Sunday. Papa John's sales are 48 percent higher than on other Sundays. Pizza Hut will reveal only that Super Bowl day is the chain's busiest Sunday of the year.

We asked three trained tasters to compare plain tomato-and-cheese pizza from these three top-selling chains. After a three-hour training session, they sampled pizza at each of the chains in two states. All the pizzas, it turned out, were very good overall. However, they varied slightly in quality and tasted different, which means they'll appeal to different people.

Touchdown: Papa John's Original Crust Cheese Pizza. It had an Italian-style crust (similar to good, slightly chewy Italian bread) and a fresh-tomato flavor that balanced nicely with slightly stringy mozzarella-style cheese and mild herbs and spices. The sauce was sweet.

Field goal: Pizza Hut Pan Pizza. The bottom of its thick crust had a crispy, fried quality and was oily, but the mozzarella-style cheese was ...