Five men stood in front of colorfully painted beer pong tables Friday, their backs to the Showalter Fountain. Ten large cheese pizzas from Pizza X stood in front of them.
Each competitor shared one goal — to eat two of the pizzas before a 30-minute timer was up.
The eating competition was sponsored by IU Student Television’s “Not Too Late” comedy show and hosted by senior Mark Lowney, who also competed for the prize. Last October, Lowney hosted a similar event with the lofty aim of eating 25 Raising Cane’s chicken fingers in one sitting.
Lowney managed to stuff down 19 chicken fingers before they came back up, but the stunt garnered attention on X. IU sophomore John Carter Krell, the show’s writer and producer, said Pizza X reached out to Lowney via social media afterward and proposed the idea of a pizza-related competition.
“We went through a bunch of different versions of what the challenge would be,” Krell said. “But eventually we settled on this traditional eating competition sort of thing with multiple contestants.”
Pizza X offered to give IUSTV the pizzas and prize.
“Boys, this is what you’re playing for,” Krell said through his megaphone at the start of the competition, showing a $50 Pizza X gift card to the crowd of around 40 people.
Krell said IUSTV made a public callout on Instagram asking for contestants. Five current and former IU students were up to the challenge.
“I saw that it was happening, and I thought, ‘man, wouldn’t that be fun?’” IU sophomore Xander Howard, one of the competitors, said. “Now I’m here, and it’s a lot of pizza, and I don’t have a lot of stomach.”
Howard said he heard about the chicken finger event IUSTV hosted last fall. On the day of the pizza competition, he didn’t have breakfast or lunch. The only thing he had eaten was four grapes, and he said he did push-ups and sit-ups to make himself hungrier.
“I’m just enjoying the fact I’m gonna get some free pizza,” competitor and IU junior Harley Babbitt said. “Get to hang out with some cool people, get to be on TV, and then, you know, I’ll go home, and it’ll be a cool memory.”
Babbitt said he was at the chicken finger event, and thought it was cool it brought so many people together. Around 80 people attended the event, and posts about it garnered hundreds of thousands of views on social media.
“I liked seeing Mark slowly slow down, and eventually the sort of disastrous conclusion that came,” Babbitt said.
Lowney switched up his strategy for the competition, dunking his pizza in water to help it go down easier. He said he didn’t eat at all the day before the competition but drank lots of water.
The tagline for the chicken finger event was “We’re changing the culture of IU.” The flyer IUSTV posted to their Instagram read “Changing the culture of IU. Again.”
Krell said that he thought the tagline felt natural to continue as the culture across “the entire nation and the world got a little crazier”.
“I think that what we all need is some friendly competition with some good pizza on a beautiful day,” Krell said. “If we can do that, then we can start a lot more.”
Krell shouted into the megaphone for the competitors to start eating shortly after 3 p.m., with the competitors lined up behind their respective boxes of pizza. Four minutes in, IU alumnus Connor Rose and Lowney had both already downed half of a pizza; Howard, Babbitt and sophomore Tyler Brose lagged slightly behind.
Brose’s strategy was to stack the pizzas on top of each other and shove everything into his mouth as quickly as possible.
“I’ve heard that you need to eat as much as possible in the first 15 minutes,” Brose said. “And you have to keep drinking water because pizza is very salty.”
At the 15-minute mark, Brose still had one whole pizza and a slice and a half left. Lowney and Rose were neck-and-neck, with only five slices left each.
Rose graduated in December 2024 but said he has been friends with Lowney for a while and he joined for fun — and free pizza.
“I know I don’t want to start too fast, because I think if I, try to, like, burn through that first pizza, I’ll never make it through the second one,” Rose said.
He said he liked Pizza X for being a simple pizza that didn’t try to do too much. For most of the competition, it was a game between him and Lowney, coming down to the last slice. But in the end, only one man could win, and it was not the eating competition veteran.
Applause erupted from the crowd as Rose took the gift card.
“I may never eat pizza again,” Rose said.
Viewers cheered as the uneaten pizza boxes were passed around the crowd. Krell said he didn’t know for sure if eating competitions would become a staple on every season of the show.
“But it’s something that we clearly enjoy doing and have a lot of fun doing,” he said. “So if it does really well, I can absolutely see us doing more in the future.”
