Tournament of Champions II: The Brackets stand revealed!

In a somewhat surprising move, Food Network released the brackets for Tournament of Champions II on, of all places Twitter, right after Sunday’s episode. This mostly had to do with a contest the network is running, but regardless it was a bit of a shock to not have the seeding and first round battles revealed on the show itself.

In any event, foodies everywhere now know where your favorite chef has been seeded and who they will be facing in the first round for both the East and West Coast brackets. And while some chefs are exactly where you think they would be, there are a few surprises that has us shaking our heads.

As you will remember, we did our own mock brackets for both the East Coast and the West Coast. We took into consideration a number of different factors as well as a whole lot of guessing. Seriously, we guessed more than we should have.

Anyway, now that the brackets have been revealed, we can say we did a pretty decent job figuring out where everyone would fall. We were much more accurate when it came to the West Coast, but overall we didn’t do that bad.

Our Tournament of Champions brackets vs the Food Network versions.

As a reminder, we had the East Coast bracket breaking down as follows:

No. 1 seed Amanda Freitag vs No. 8 seed TBA
No. 2 seed Maneet Chauhan vs No. 7 seed Bryan Voltaggio
No. 3 seed Darnell Ferguson vs No. 6 seed Marc Murphy
No. 4 seed Madison Cowan vs No. 5 seed Christian Petroni

And this is the version released by Food Network:

No. 1 seed Amanda Freitag vs No. 8 seed Tiffani Faison
No. 2 seed Maneet Chauhan vs No. 7 seed Madison Cowan
No. 3 seed Christian Petroni vs No. 6 seed Bryan Voltaggio
No. 4 seed Darnell Ferguson vs No. 5 seed Marc Murphy

As you can see, we got the top two seeds right but that’s about it. How you have Madison Cowan and a No. 7 seed is beyond me given his skills and accomplishments, I would have thought he would place much higher. And giving Christian Petroni the No. 3 seed over Darnell Ferguson? Seriously? That makes zero sense.

As for the West Coast, our mock bracket looked like this:

No. 1 seed Brooke Williamson vs No. 8 seed TBA
No. 2 seed Antonia Lofaso vs No. 7 seed Aaron May
No. 3 seed Jet Tila vs No. 6 seed Brian Malarkey
No. 4 seed Michael Voltaggio vs No. 5 seed Cat Cora

And the official version:

No. 1 seed Brooke Williamson vs No. 8 seed Nyesha Arrington
No. 2 seed Antonia Lofaso vs No. 7 seed Brian Malarkey
No. 3 seed Jet Tila vs No. 6 seed Aaron May
No. 4 seed Cat Cora vs No. 5 seed Michael Voltaggio

We were spot on with the top three seeds and as we mentioned before, Cat Cora and Michael Voltaggio are effectively interchangeable as far as seeding so we’ll call that a win. I honestly don’t understand how Brian “Mayhem” May could seed higher than Brian Malarkey, but we’ll see how he does against Jet Tila in the first round.

The first round battles begin this coming Sunday as Tournament of Champions II kicks into high gear.

What do you think Guilty Eats Nation? What do you think about the brackets? Do you think Food Network got them right? Leave a comment below and let us know or join the conversation on our Twitter page.