Big Brother 11: Why Braden Lost

Here we are once again, Big Brother fans! We’ve had the first eviction of the season, so it’s time for this column to return. As longtime readers know, and as an introduction to newcomers, I will be examining the reasons for each houseguest’s loss shortly after they are out the door. Each week, this will be done by looking back at What Big Brother 11 Houseguests Should Have Learned to examine the causes for their game demise.

We start with Braden, who certainly didn’t initially seem like he would be a likely candidate to be voted out first. But things change quickly in the Big Brother house, and just when you think you’re doing okay, you can suddenly find yourself in the hot seat. How did that happen to Braden? Why did Braden lose?

The first rule, as always, is that Big Brother players need to scheme and plot. Braden was in an alliance with Jeff and company, and was viewed by some as being the leader or co-leader of such alliance.

However, just being in an alliance doesn’t mean you’re doing a good job scheming. He mostly tried to lie back and play it cool, letting others do the scheming around him. Meanwhile, though, others in the house were doing plenty of scheming and trying to figure out what was going on in the minds of those around them.

Ironically, Braden was thought to perhaps be scheming and plotting too much when he was actually doing too little of it. He was so laid-back that people thought there had to be a lot more going on there, which made them nervous.

However, Braden did violate another part of the second rule by failing to keep his scheming secret. It’s hard to keep secrets in the Big Brother house, but everybody knew Braden stood with Jeff, Jordan, Laura, etc. There was no chance he was going to cross over to the (most of the) Athlete and (most of the) Brain alliance, which made him a viable target for that group.

Until he was nominated, Braden did fine with the third rule in pretending to be nice. But once he was on the block, that went straight out the window. When he confronted Lydia and attacked her and Kevin, Braden turned into a completely different person, throwing around attacks and racial epithets. Such behavior certainly solidified opposition to him in some minds – for example, there was no way Lydia and Kevin would ever even consider working with him after that outburst. Strategic enemies turn into allies, and vice versa, in the Big Brother house pretty quickly. But the same is not generally true of personal enemies – and Braden made at least two personal enemies with that outburst.

The outburst itself came from a failure to follow the fourth rule and control his emotions. Braden told me, “You go crazy in that house with all the yelling and controversy and all that.” Sure, it’s an excuse – and a poor one at that – but it’s also at least partially true. Being in the house messes with you and you have to be able to handle it. Braden couldn’t do it. As the rule says, “We’ve seen other people degenerate into meanspiritedness as well, often over trivial things.” While that part of the rule was meant to talk about people who had been there quite a bit longer, it also applies to Braden – he was fine until he was nominated, and then he went psycho.

Braden was also the subject of hypothesizing when it came to his challenge prowess – that is, several players thought he would be a threat in the future, which put Braden in violation of the fifth rule. Admittedly, there wasn’t a whole lot he could do about this, so it was mostly in their minds, but he didn’t do anything to stop them from worrying either. Jessie worried about it, Russell worried about it, etc. In the game of Big Brother, you need to be able to read your opponents and, when you see that they are starting to worry about you, do something to focus their attention elsewhere.

This is just what Lydia did to get herself off the block and Braden onto it. He might have been upset that she was spreading tales about him, but she did what she needed to do to save herself – and she was absolutely correct to do so.

The sixth rule tells players to be flexible. Braden didn’t have much time to make use of this rule, but as noted earlier, he was clearly in an alliance with several other players – and that alliance stood in opposition to the HOH’s group. If it had been totally up to Jessie, he probably would have put Jeff on the block in Lydia’s place; but since Jeff is in his clique and was therefore safe from nomination, Braden was the next on the list.

The seventh rule didn’t really come into play, as Braden wasn’t stabbed in the back by somebody in whom he had placed a lot of trust. I mean, sure, he was mad at Lydia, but as I noted earlier, she did what she had to do.

That was a major reason for Braden being nominated. It wasn’t so much that he had failed to play well, but he was being outplayed by Lydia, who went full throttle to make sure she wasn’t evicted. She schemed and plotted and got herself taken off the block; he… didn’t do a whole lot of anything, even after he had been secretly told he was going to be the replacement nominee. He could have gone to Jessie and tried to turn things around (for example, using Ronnie as a sacrificial lamb, since he was playing to both sides). But he didn’t. He played the laid-back surfer dude and just waited.

Of course, after being nominated, the worst in Braden came out. It didn’t affect the split in the house too much, but as noted above, it did make sure nobody would cross from the HOH’s alliance to Braden’s. Braden thought he had the numbers to stick around, but all it took was Ronnie’s switched vote to turn everything upside-down.

I don’t really think Braden was in the right frame of mind for the game of Big Brother. He was too laid back when he shouldn’t have been, and was too excitable when he similarly shouldn’t have been. He was easily outschemed and then failed to control himself. That is why Braden lost.

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