Big Brother 5: Why Michael Lost

It’s all over, we have our winner, Drew, and our final evictee, Michael. The Cowboy goes home with fifty grand, but he didn’t win the big bucks. Of course, that means it’s time to take a look back at What Big Brother 5 Houseguests Should Have Learned to see what Michael did right, what he did wrong, and why Michael lost.

One thing that was discussed quite a bit by the jurors was their claim that he didn’t really play the game. Let’s take a look at that in terms of the first rule, scheming and plotting: “From the very beginning, you have to start making alliances and cementing relationships.” Michael was part of the Four Horsemen alliance, which was created almost immediately. While many viewers (myself included) counted the Horsemen as dead when Scott and Jase left, two out of four of them were the Final 2!

Michael did not scheme and plot, but he did make a solid alliance and hold to it. Along the way, he also got in good with the twins, which would have helped him if their sub-alliance had held sway. But even in so doing, he never really alienated anybody. He just kept moving along, one day at a time, until suddenly he was in the finals. It is somewhat ironic that Diane criticized this type of game play, since she aided in it! In fact, to some extent almost all of them did. So they criticized his lack of game play but he was the one in the Final 2, so he obviously did something right.

However, that something wasn’t enough when compared to Drew. We’ll address that more in “Why Drew Won,” but it seemed to be a pretty clear distinction in the way the voters were leaning: Some wanted to vote for Drew because they felt he really played the game while Michael didn’t. Some wanted to vote for Michael because he was honest while Drew lied. I’m not sure it’s possible to play Big Brother without ever lying, but Michael may have come as close to it as can be done. Close… but no cigar.

Obviously, Michael didn’t have to worry about plotting and scheming too much. Nor did he need to fret about backstabbing somebody too early – since I don’t think he ever backstabbed anybody. The only area he failed at here was in keeping his scheming secret. With Michael, everybody always knew where he stood – or in some cases who he ran back to with information. Some of them complained about him being a snitch, but we didn’t see anything in the end that indicated that played a role in the vote.

The third rule is to pretend to be nice. Michael didn’t have to pretend – he is just a nice guy. In general he acted like an adult (except when he was running around naked, with just his cowboy hat covering himself – and that stopped after his phone call with fiancé April) and didn’t do anything to hurt himself in this regard.

Fourth we have the rule against allowing emotions to control you. (I’d just like to give a shout out to Mike, the first evictee, who pointed out in the finale that Diane let her emotions control her in her last week. Good eye, Mike!) Michael did pretty much live and die by his emotions in the game. He allied with three people he liked, he became more attached to the twins because he liked them, etc. However, when it came time for him to choose between voting out his half-sister or the person he thought could help him get to the Finals, he booted the sister, Nakomis. She had made some emotional pleas to him, but he didn’t let them sway him from what he felt was a better plan. (Of course, it helped that she tried to get him booted previously, so her pleas sounded a bit hypocritical!)

The fifth rule is to not be too much of a threat. I would say that Michael succeeded spectacularly here, though likely not by design. He never won HOH. He won one Veto. Nobody thought of him as the guy who would stab them in the back. So eviction by eviction, he managed to keep strolling along into the Finals.

He could have been voted out sooner because he was too nice and people want to go up against somebody unlikable in the end (like Diane, for example). But Drew got it into his head that Michael would be easier to beat than Diane, so he kept the Cowboy around.

The sixth rule says not to be lazy or show bad habits. This didn’t really come into play here, so let’s move on to the seventh: Be flexible. Michael was not exactly the most flexible person to play the game. He made an alliance right away and expected it to last. In some ways, it was incredibly naïve. In others, well, he and one of his alliance-mates were the Final 2!