a thing that happens · PAWing Bowl

A competitive wing-eating contest run by a Philadelphia sports radio station on the Friday before the Super Bowl. Al Morganti and Angelo Cataldi of WIP started it in 1993, for a city whose football team kept not reaching the Super Bowl. Two eaters and 150 spectators in a hotel lobby the first year; crowds over 20,000 in an arena by the 2000s, at six in the morning, with a field of qualifiers, costumed entourages, and women called Wingettes escorting the eaters. WIP ended it in 2018. A Las Vegas edition ran on 7 February 2026.

Morganti came up with it because the Eagles were going nowhere, and, it is also said, because he had had enough of the Buffalo Bills reaching Super Bowls and losing them. Wing Bowl I was held in the lobby of the Wyndham Franklin Plaza in Center City. Joan Brewington turned up in a bathrobe and boxing gloves, punching the air; Carmen Cordero won and took home a hibachi.

Entry came two ways: perform an eating stunt live on the WIP morning show with Morganti judging — twenty cups of oatmeal, five Big Macs, a gallon of milk — or win a Wingoff at a bar in Philadelphia or South Jersey. Morganti disallowed stunts he considered cheating, like dunking bread to get it down. Mayor Ed Rendell handed out a Liberty Bell trophy at four of them. Umpire Eric Gregg was commissioner from the second year until his death in 2006, then Pat Croce, then Jon Dorenbos for the last five.

The counts climbed and climbed. Jonathan Squibb won three straight from 2009 to 2011, ending at 255. Takeru Kobayashi ate 337 in 2012. Molly Schuyler ate 363 in 2014, Patrick Bertoletti 444 in 2015, Schuyler 429 in 2016 and then 501 in the last Philadelphia edition, Wing Bowl XXVI on 2 February 2018. Prizes by then ran to a truck, a motorcycle, a ring and cash.

The criticism is part of the record and was published while the event still ran. Philadelphia Magazine's Richard Rys, writing on 18 January 2015 under the headline "Wing Bowl: Is It Time to End It?", called it "WIP's annual celebration of the most primal male instincts (gluttony, protracted leering, getting shitfaced on Miller Lite at six in the morning)" and described what he had watched happen to women in the crowd: "I've seen men grab two women by their heads and try to make them kiss, or claw at women's shirts when the camera pans past." Columnist Ronnie Polaneczky, quoted in the same piece, described a strip-club mentality in which all women are for sale. WIP announced the end on 30 October 2018, nine months after the Eagles won Super Bowl LII; program director Spike Eskin said "When Wing Bowl started … a large part of it was the lead-up to the Super Bowl never involved the Eagles. We just wanted to get to the promised land." When a documentary, No One Died: The Wing Bowl Story, arrived in August 2026, the Philadelphia Inquirer quoted Taggart, who made it, on what it had to carry: "You have to show the El Wingador stuff. You have to show the ugly of the fights and some of the misogyny."

Thirty minutes of eating in the Philadelphia years, judged by wing count. The Las Vegas revival ran twenty competitors in rounds for a $5,000 winner-takes-all prize, and the winning 189 was scored 85, 71 and 33 across three of them.

The Plaza Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas held Wing Bowl on 7 February 2026, the first outside Philadelphia. Molly Schuyler won it with 189 wings, ahead of Bob Shoudt on 162 and Dan Kennedy on 117 — her fourth Wing Bowl win, after 2014, 2016 and the 501 of 2018.