March Madness is one of the biggest events on the sports calendar for fans due to the unpredictable nature of the three-week tournament. If a top seed isn’t on top of their game, they’ll find themselves at home. Fans absolutely love the upset.

The culinary world is similar in nature, as it is extremely competitive, with chefs constantly trying to outdo each other and prove they’re the best.

Tournament Of Champions (TOC) is a show on Food Network hosted by Guy Fieri, who also hosts Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives, and Guy’s Grocery Games, which implements a bracket just like in March Madness for Men’s and Women’s College Basketball. In each battle, the chefs have 30 minutes to prepare a dish based on the parameters given to them by… the randomizer! The randomizer decides the mandatory details: Protein, produce, equipment, style, and a wild card category, which the chefs must cook with for each battle. No two battles have the same set of parameters outside of the 30-minute time limit.

Every battle is a 1 v. 1 sudden-death matchup. Once the battle is done, the chefs return to their trailers and watch while two highly acclaimed chefs in Justin Warner and Simon Majumdar observe the battle and get the details, presenting the dishes to the judges, who are kept in the dark about who cooked each dish. That way, it’s just about the dishes being presented and nothing else. Like the competitors, the judges are high-profile chefs who have compiled a lot of accolades in their own right.

The judges score each battle utilizing three categories:

1. Taste (worth 50 points)
2. Usage of the randomizer (worth 40 points)
3. Presentation (worth 10 points)    

There’s a different trio of judges in each episode, however, each battle has the same judges.  

So far, four champions have been crowned in TOC: Brooke Williamson in Season 1,  Maneet Chauhan in Season 2, Tiffani Faison in Season 3, and  Mei Lin in Season 4. The winner of the eight-week competition receives a championship belt, as well as a huge cash prize of $150,000. This season, all four champs, along with 28 other chefs, are competing.

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Since the champions from the first four seasons are competing across the four regions (East A, East B, West A, and West B) this season, Fieri and the rest of the TOC crew couldn’t simply choose some no-name chef at a neighborhood cafe to challenge Williamson, Chauhan, Faison, and Lin. For the first time, the show kicked off with a 16-chef qualifier series, where the competitors will have the chance to earn one of the four remaining eight-seed slots in the TOC main bracket.

It doesn’t matter how good of a chef someone is; the pressure of competing in the TOC kitchen and the randomizer can take anyone down. However, at the same time, someone goes on a Cinderella-type run as seen yearly in the NCAA Tournaments.  During Season 4, chef Britt Rescigno was a No. 8 seed in TOC, and she went all the way to the Final Four before falling to Chauhan.  Before bowing out, Rescigno took down Faison, Darnell Ferguson, and Jose Garces. In Round 1 of Season 5, a major upset occurred, as the No. 8 seed Kevin Lee took down TOC Season 1 champ Williamson.

Round 1 of Season 5 is in the books, and at the time of publication,   Round 2 is commencing with the Super 16. The remaining chefs are just four victories away from taking home the championship belt. The parameters have changed; each battle is now 35 minutes instead of 30, and the Wild Card category is different on the randomizer. The current categories are:

• Lower Seed Re-Spin
• Higher Seed Re-Spin
• Chefs Re-Spin
• Audience Re-Spin
•  Other kinds of re-spins

The Super 16 kicked off with a heavyweight fight, as the No. 2 seed Michael Voltaggio battled the No. 3 seed Antonia Lofaso, and it was a two-point difference, with Lofaso taking home the win 84-82. Lofaso moves on to the Elite Eight, where she’ll take on Lee. Lee is now embarking on a run reminiscent of what Rescigno did in Season 4. ,

After the Elite Eight matchup between Lee and Lofaso got set in the West A region, it was time to figure out the Elite Eight matchup in the East A Region. First, the No. 3 seed Tobias Dorzon took down the No. 7 seed Dale Talde, which was followed by Chauhan taking down Eric Adjepong,  setting up an Elite Eight matchup between Dorzon and Chaunhan.

The rest of the Elite Eight will be set up on the March 24  episode of TOC.

New episodes of TOC air on Sunday nights at 8 p.m.