No, I can’t find the rhyme or reason either. For a while, DC-area Domino’s offered one dollar off per pizza per Redskins touchdown, which was nuts when they scored six touchdowns that one time. Do chain pizza places in New York offer deals like this after Jets and Giants games? Could it ever be enough to prompt you to order from a chain pizza place in New York?
Fun fact: Someone in my office building today ordered Domino’s. In Manhattan. It was weird.
And furthermore, are there 10 toppings you’d want on a pizza, together, from Papa John’s? Former roommate Ted Burke suggests “10 times the regular amount of cheese,” which seems reasonable. Looking at the menu, I guess I could go pepperoni, ham, spicy sausage, regular sausage, beef (this is a topping?), bacon, canadian bacon, extra cheese, green peppers and jalapeno peppers. That might be a decent pizza.
Tedquarters 
10 times the amount of regular cheese is like wishing for more wishes.
Fact: Sauce is more important than cheese when it comes to pizza. Too much cheese can ruin a slice, but there’s no such thing as too much sauce if it’s well made.
I would argue that, as with sandwiches, proportion is paramount. I’ve actually made pizzas with too much sauce, and what happens, I’ve found, is you wind up biting into a puddle of boiling-hot sauce and burn the hell out of your mouth.
I’m with you that I’d prefer a sauce-heavy pizza over a cheese-heavy pizza. As much as chain pizzas all suck, Pizza Hut is clearly the worst of the lot IMHO because they load up their pizzas with crappy cheese and don’t use enough crappy sauce.
This post makes me upset that I’m living in Wisconsin now. Papa Johns and Domino’s are some of the best we’ve got up here. Every time I come home, my first meal is a slice of sicilian from Gino’s and a bagel from the bagel store next store to Gino’s. Mmm… 8 days until NY food…
Chain pizzerias are the worst things ever. The worst non-chain pizzeria is better than anything from Domino’s, Pizza Hut, Papa John’s, etc.
I submit that if you stop thinking of chain pizza as “pizza” and think of it instead as “weird plastic cheese pastry”, it’s actually not so bad. It’s like if you started calling cat food “hummus”. Obviously it would be the worst kind of hummus. But as cat food goes, maybe it’s ok with a some good Tahini.
That’s a good way to survive if you’re in a place where your best pizza options are chains. When I was in college, until Romeo’s opened up, Papa John’s was really the best pizza available to us. It’s edible, and it comes with butter to dip your crust in, which is simultaneously the grossest and most awesome thing in the world.
Oh, and you have to accept that you will get sick every time you eat it.
In Philadelphia, the Papa John’s deal is a free topping for every Eagles touchdown, doubled for a win. That means the day after the MNF Redskins game, you could get 16 toppings, way more than they have. So yeah, extra garlic butter dipping sauce please.