I'm going to explain what I think happened to Kevin. He was clearly off his game during the finale and he came in a very disappointing Spoiler 3rd place . I believe there were a few reasons that I'm going to discuss below. The most obvious reason was that he got fucked when he got forced to take the Indian lesbian on his team. This is the woman who couldn't fucking shuck oysters during a team quickfire. It's not like she was slow, she was stagnant. The other team finished while she was on oyster #3. It's a basic fucking cooking skill! She went to Le Cordon Bleu in London, they have an entire class set up just for shellfish. How can she not shuck a dozen oysters in under a minute is beyond my comprehension, it's like being a NASCAR racer and not know how to change gears on your family minivan. So when I saw that Preeti was on Kevin's team I immediately knew this was going to suck for him. This was confirmed when Kevin said that he had 20 things that needed to get done and Preeti could BARELY do 2 of them in an entire afternoon. She couldn't even make a simple chiffonade cut on fucking vegtables. That's like cooking 101. How the fuck did she get on the show? To get on the show you have to show them you have cooking skills. You basically take a test before you are cast. How the fuck did she get on the show? Technically she was horrendous with just the basic fucking shit you learn from working one year in almost any restaurant. Most dishwashers I work with can do what Preeti did without batting an eyelash. So I nominate Preeti as being the worst chef ever to be on Top Chef. She totally fucked Kevin. I don't even understand why they had to be randomly selected? If you want the chefs to cook their best dishes, shouldn't they have access to all the tools they deem necessary to accomplish this? This "wild card" did have a lot of impact on the outcome of the final. It simply wasn't fair to Kevin on a number of levels. Instead of having to worry about the menu and cooking everything to perfection, Kevin was forced to have to take on twice the workload AS WELL AS having to double check the 10% of the work his sous chef was doing with a subpar effort. This cost Kevin valuable time, time which would be better spent concentrating on cooking his 20 elements to perfection. Having Preeti as an almost completely inept sous chef for a day definitely threw Kevin off his game. The next reason is purely speculative, but I think it was a deciding factor in why Kevin was off his game. Kevin had to watch footage of prior shows during his hiatus before the final. For some reason he kept talking about how intricate the Brothers V's dishes were when compared to his. He seemed like he was psyched out by them the second he walked on the screen. He kept repeating over and over how they were world's better then him just based on their skill levels and how he was just trying to keep up with them with his own technical merits. I know that this was played up with the constant sound bites of Mike V constantly talking shit about his skill set as compared to Kevin. I believe that Kevin probably watched a couple of episodes of the show and it scared him. It got into his head, he was not the same happy and confident chef we had watched all season. It threw him off his game. However, I think Kevin was completely wrong in this assessment of his own abilities. Kevin cooks comfort food. I have no problem with that, what I do have a problem with is that people have a preconceived notion of what exactly comfort food is. They see Paula Dean and think that if you cook without regard to health content you can pass it off as comfort food. This is a wrong assumption and Kevin's cooking can show you exactly why. What Kevin does as a chef is incredibly complicated, he makes elegant food where elegance in cuisine shouldn't exist. He serves very humble dishes that are thoughtful, playful and gives great insight about the man who cooked them. In other words: he cooks with personality. Cooking comfort food that is upscale without being pretentious is hard as hell. There are maybe 5 chefs on the planet who can pull it off. IMO it's far more difficult to do what Kevin does then what the Brothers V do as chefs. The Brothers V might have Kevin beat on technical merits but they don't seem to serve anything that comes from the soul. Somewhere along the line Kevin forgot about that and why he was in the finale to begin with. He was no longer cooking the charming dishes that came from his heart and was overthinking his menu in an effort to try and match the Brothers V on technical merits. I think it showed because the judges said over and over that there was a huge change in the way he seasoned his food which had been his calling card during the entire season. Add these reasons up and you can see why Kevin ended up with such a poor showing.I really believe Kevin could have won had he stayed on his game and cook with his own method rather then trying to emulate something that he was not. Still, I am going to Atlanta in a month and his restaurant is the first place I'm heading to after I land.