Big Brother 11: Why Russell Lost

Russell claimed just before leaving the Big Brother house, just after exiting, and again in my interview with him that he had done his best to incorporate the strategies of four previous Big Brother winners – Evel Dick, Dr. Will, Mike Boogie, and Dan (I just now noticed that Dan is the only one of them without a nickname…). How could he possibly have gone wrong in emulating four previous winners? Maybe the question is really how he could have ever thought he could go right by trying to pull together four such different ways of playing the game. But in the end, the main question is: Why did Russell lose?

We’ll end up answering all of these questions by taking our usual trip through What Big Brother 11 Houseguests Should Have Learned. Of course, for Russell we’ll also have to talk a bit about those other four winners he mentioned, but Russell will still get top billing here.

One thing all four of those players certainly understood was the importance of the first rule, scheming and plotting. Russell seemed to understand it as well, at least in theory. After all, he was part of an alliance… at times. He did make multiple deals… at times. He did try to come up with his own schemes… at times.

But almost all of that was overshadowed by Russell’s behavior in the house. As much as he claimed to me that he was using the strategy of Dr. Will, in part, “to be upfront with people and let them know that I was playing a game and was there for the money,” I do not feel that we really saw that. Or, at least, we didn’t see Russell doing that well. Instead of conveying the Dr. Will feeling of “I’m lying to everybody but you can still believe me,” people got the opposite feeling with Russell – he would tell them the truth and they wouldn’t believe him!

While another part of his plan was to “charm the ladies. Win them over and charm with a funny side. Show a side that wasn’t really tough guy,” I have to say he failed there as well. What lady wanted to be “charmed” by a guy who was going around screaming like a maniac and causing all sorts of problems in the house? I mean, look at the way he “charmed” Jordan, to the point that she wanted to get violent with him!

Then we had what he said he wanted to incorporate from Dan: “when I would let some of the other people fight and not jump in and sit in the background even though they were really my battles to fight.” There were a few times when Russell would defy our expectations and remain calm rather than blowing up, but he blew up a lot more frequently, or so it seemed.

The fact is that the four strategies he chose to emulate did indeed work well for those particular players (though I would never encourage anybody to follow the lead of Evel Dick, considering we inducted him into the Reality TV Hall of Shame for it!). But they were four distinct strategies and do not meld well together. I mean, really, how can you rationally think you can combine Evel Dick’s strategy of intimidation and fight-causing with Dan’s strategy of fight-avoiding?! How can you combine Dan’s plan to make everybody trust him with Dr. Will’s plan to admit he was a liar to everybody? It just doesn’t work.

As a result of trying to combine these four strategies, Russell seemed to spend more time worrying about these rather than just playing the game. He started out as part of an alliance, but was also on the outside. That pretty much described his game – in and out of alliances, in and out of danger. Without Jeff getting the Coup D’etat power, Russell would have been gone a couple weeks ago. Ironically, it was then Jeff who got Russell out anyway. Back and forth Russell went.

A lot of that was the result of Russell violating the second rule, which warns against scheming and plotting too much. It seemed that in trying to combine the different strategies, he also showed multiple personalities. For example, he could viciously attack a person one minute, then try to make an alliance with them the next (as he did with Ronnie). But then he could turn on that person again just a short while later, leaving everybody confused!

While the sixth rule (to jump ahead a bit) does advocate maintaining flexibility, what Russell did went too far beyond that concept. He was disloyal to his original alliance. He was disloyal to his new alliance. He didn’t allow himself the flexibility to jump into either alliance as the situation needed because he alienated just about everybody (save Michele).

In the end, it was a combination of the remaining players in both of those alliances that turned on him to get him evicted! They had been going at each other since the beginning of the game, but eventually decided that Russell was the real enemy. Sure, Jeff deserves blame for believing Natalie and Kevin, but they couldn’t have gotten him to believe them if there hadn’t already been a large kernel of truth to the story they were perpetrating. Russell made himself appear to be a guy who couldn’t be believed.