I dunno, I think Jeff's salmon might have been a throw.
You might be right, actually. Jeff kept his head down the entire challenge -- usually, he's the guy stepping out in front and organizing people in team challenges -- which he's pretty good at, actually, although it often comes at the expense of attention to his own cooking.
Having been dinged on that before, and already having proved his leadership & management skills, I can totally see that he made a conscious decision to just focus on his cooking for this challenge and not stick his neck out.
Which is totally different from the Leah and Hosea strategy of "slack off and throw teammate under bus" from the previous episode, or their strangely winning strategy of "let's substitute romantic drama for anything of culinary value and let Stefan and Fabio do all the work."
Truly, they are failing upward.