Strength of Top Chef competitors on Tournament of Champions

TOC VII premieres tonight on Food Network with the qualifiers

Tournament of Champions (TOC) is like the March Madness of the cooking competition world. It’s structured by a bracket, and the chefs are given seeds based on past performance in TOC and other cooking competitions. Tonight will be the first of the qualifying rounds, and we’ll be able to see many familiar Top Chef faces tonight as well as the coming Sunday evenings.

There are a LOT of Top Chef contestants who appear on TOC, and last year, I analyzed how well these chefs did against those who had not competed on Top Chef before.

Today, I want to see how well these chefs did in comparison to each other during Top Chef. Based on the idea of OPS+ in baseball, I created a similar statistic called NPT+ (read more about this and other stats here). NPT+ allows for the comparison across all seasons of Top Chef, highlighting the rate that the chef was not at the bottom of challenges and the rate of being at the top or winning challenges.